Archive | January 2014

Óyeme Voz: U.S. Latin@ & Immigrant Communities Re-Sound Citizenship and Belonging

En Espanol siguiente.

Post by Nancy Morales.  Translation by Martha Unzueta-Perez, m.unzueta.perez@gmail.com

My recent experiences—both inside and outside the academy—as a U.S. citizen with an “ivy league education” make it crystal clear to me that I am a brown mujer who will always be criminalized by the state regardless of how many “privileges” I acquire or believe to have obtained through my “hard work.”  I cannot continue my path toward self-determination without acknowledging that the privileges I acquire will not guarantee my protection, let alone my liberation.  In other words, people of color are perpetually vulnerable regardless of their education, wealth, and/or social status. In “Speaking in Tongues: A letter to Third World Women Writers” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Gloria Anzaldúa explored this notion in her letter to third world women writers, where she expressed that we have never had any privileges and we never will (165).  Anzaldúa makes this statement not to foreclose our dreams but rather to enable our liberation; in essence, we have nothing to lose by imagining other ways of being. If we were to perform as the imagined ideal U.S. citizen under the hetero-normative standards (racial, gender, and sexuality, including sonic markers of citizenship), it would always be at the expense of displacing each other. Privilege is too often misunderstood as a form of protection from displacement and a claim of worthiness as human beings.

Amplifying and extending the resonance of Anzaldúa’s powerful declaration, my scholarship is personally healing because I seek to understand the very modes of knowledge production: how meaningful research is undertaken and actualized, particularly by and for immigrant communities, by exploring how these groups help us imagine new and yet unknown territories wherein our differences are valid. Los Jornaleros del Norte, Radio Ambulante and other immigrant rights folks provide examples of imagining other ways of being, including the production of sonic markers of citizenship that are not state-sanctioned. In other words, they are doing the work of knowing themselves better in order to respect and understand each other. Often, some of the most crucial knowledge production happens through the materiality of sounds and the material impacts of listening practices, both dominant and resistant.

Protest Bullhorn

Rallying the Crowd with a Bullhorn, Arizona SB 1070 Protest, May 2010, Image by Flickr User Xomiele

Citizenship is (mis)understood as a privilege that guarantees protection by the nation-state. The current nation-state’s dominant discourse of national security creates draconian federal, state, and local legislation that belie immigrants’ differences. Rising anti-immigrant rhetoric attempts to homogenize both Latinas/os and immigrants as criminals. In other words, such discourse is used to justify the nation-state as the reference point for recognizing a legitimate community. The Department of Homeland Security’s agenda deems who may be tolerable and who is deportable, even if you are a U.S. citizen. Distinguishing, for example, between exceptional students who “deserve to be here” and those who do not, creates a hierarchy of immigrants. Consequently, public discourse over the worthiness of recognition and belonging creates limitations that categorize immigrants in restrictive ways. Similarly, attacks on bilingual education and ethnic studies attempt to displace Latinos as foreign and “alien” within US territories.

Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman’s “The Noise of SB 1070: or Do I Sound Illegal to You?” provides sonic examples of discrimination to reveal how citizenship is further constructed through sound. The dominant listening ear, as Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman coins, reveals:

how racialized norms about sound exist and circulate through popular culture. As a result dominant groups use sound with impunity to forge “reasonable suspicion” about the citizenship status of anyone who sounds different from them and who creates, consumes, and appreciates sounds differently from them (5).

More importantly we learn that sonic markers of citizenship are just as unreliable as biological/physical ones i.e. racial profiling. One may have an accent or speak Spanish but that doesn’t prove or disprove their citizenship status. However, what we understand more prominently is the various ways brown bodies are displaced through structural racism such as sonic markers of citizenship.

ICE Arrest

Image by Wikipedia

In order to more fully understand the legacy of the U.S. conquest of Latin America and the Caribbean—of which contemporary anti-terrorist and anti-immigrant rhetorics are an extension—we must recognize how colonizers use language as a weapon that can shame, humiliate and further colonize people of color. bell hooks testifies to this notion in “Teaching New Worlds/New Words” from Tongue-tied: The Lives of Multilingual Children in Public Education: “standard English is not speech of exile. This is the language of conquest and domination in U.S.” (255).  We often begin to think that we can acquire privileges of upward mobility, class, citizenship or race as our source of protection, particularly through linguistic “passing” (Anzaldúa,“Linguistic Terrorism” Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 217). However, as Anzaldúa explains in “How to Tame a Wild-Tongue” from Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza: “Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself” (81).  Deborah Vargas’s 2012 book Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (University of Minnesota Press) also explores these issues and comes at an important moment to continue to learn how the power to push the boundaries of heteronormative standards can be understood in Chican@-Laitn@ culture. By dis-placing the dominance of standard English and acknowledging the multiplicity of languages they speak and seek to listen to, Chican@s-Latin@s can begin to acknowledge their wealth of knowledge as meaningful instead of meaningless.

NDLON Banner

NDLON Banner, Image by Flickr User NDLON

Meaningful Sounds: Dignity and Respect

It is important, then, to recognize the critical work that immigrant rights communities create that push the boundaries of the dominant listening ear, particularly through the inclusion of the vocal materialities of people of color. Such immigrant rights groups mobilize the sounds of immigrant voices not as a neoliberal way of “proving their worthiness” but, like Sebastien de la Cruz, the San Antonio-area ten-year-old who sang the national anthem at game three of the 2013 NBA finals in his mariachi outfit, they use sound to create and amplify fair representations that vocally resist the dominant binaries of foreign/citizen, illegal/legal.

Los Jornaleros offer the people their talent and their love with their music of resistance and struggle

Los Jornaleros del Norte is a musical group that formed out of the struggles of day laborers. They are part of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) where they realize their cultures and languages as forms of resistance. They sing songs in Spanish at protests, rallies, on the radio and in all other public spaces.

In this clip, Los Jornaleros interject their voices to denounce deportations, wage theft and to energize (im)migrant families’ wishes and desires. Through live performances and Internet circulation, this group amplifies the actual voices of people directly affected by immigration enforcement policies and refuse to be silenced by the dominant American listening ear.

In addition, organizations such as the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and Education for Fair Consideration (E4FC) use various organizing tools to amplify the voices of immigrant communities. Alongside and in solidarity with E4FC, a network of artists, writers, and filmmakers, including Favianna Rodriguez, actively fight for just immigration reform using sound. These artists are crucial to the defense and protection of immigrant rights and for changing dominant discourses about immigrants as unworthy. For example, La Santa Cecilia, an L.A. band committed to social justice issues, collaborated with NDLON to produce a song in Spanish wherein the music video showcases people affected by un-sound immigration policies.

“ICE/El Hielo”—a multilingual play on the acronym of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—combines visual imagery of immigrants with a multiciplicity of langages, musical styles and vocal tones to help us understand the trauma and pain that immigrant communities endure on a daily level due to the dominant discourse of national security that homogenizes Latina/os and (im)migrant communities as less than human. [Note: The song can also be heard on Sounding Out!’s annual free downloadable mix for 2013. Click here—JSA]

Practices like La Santa Cecilia’s encourage Latinas/os and immigrants—who are often spoken about instead of directly spoken to— to participate in public spaces, including digital spaces. Digital spaces, I believe, can become potential safe spaces that allow Latina/os and immigrant communities to produce their own sounds and to therefore make an alternative claim to belonging that is not predicated upon speaking “Standard” English and/or being “real” American citizens. Through digital outreach, E4FC encourages undocumented youth to share their immigrant stories sonically connect immigration issues on a global scale.

While musical interventions are effective, I use the remainder of this post to address the more nuanced ways in which Latina/o and (im)migrant communities add the sound of their voices to global discourses through storytelling, music, and language(s) in beautiful (though sometimes painful), telling ways. Immigrant communities produce and circulate sounds meaningful to them to contextualize and reveal their differences within Latina/o communities. In other words, they push the boundaries of citizenship through methods of self-organizing that sounds dignity and respect for each other. I argue that sharing their perspectives and stories—here and elsewhere on the Internet—captures more than just a sound bite. The sound of “everyday voices” mobilized against—and remarking on—the nation-state’s attempts to mark immigrant communities as vulnerable exerts an impactful and profoundly material agency.

VozMob

Voz Mob Logo, Image by Flickr User RisetoMovement

For instance, Voces Móviles (VozMob), a collaboration between the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School and Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California/ Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA) uses SMS technology to document immigrant workers’ voices online.

VozMob enables day laborers and other immigrant communities to use their cell phones as a tool to share their perspectives and become narrators of their own stories via text, images and video.  Users upload their content directly to the VozMob webpage where you can read, see, and/or listen their daily experiences. In this video clip Luis Valentán shares his perspective as a day laborer about immigrant rights.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/84067495]

Rejecting the label of a “Dreamer,” Valentán sounds differences within immigrant communities by encouraging others to recognize that they are “Doers.”  He also pushes the boundaries of an immigrant rights framework that values and respects people who strive for a better life in the face of limited opportunities.

Radio Ambulante also creates a digital space for the voices of people from Latin America and the U.S. It is the first Spanish-language radio program that tells stories where culture and belonging have no borders. The programmers broadcast various thematic episodes highlighting stories that explore differences by using speakers’ primary language(s). This approach, as heard in the November 2013 episode “la palabra prohibida,” enables diverse listeners to hear people who share, and more importantly, complicate notions about cultures, origins, and perceptions of belonging.

In  “la palabra prohibida,” the broadcasters make no attempt to profile the episode’s participants as fitting the “good” or “bad” dichotomy of the immigrant narrative. Instead, Radio Ambulante creates a sonic medium that juxtaposes voices to make human complexity material for its listeners.

Click to play Radio Ambulante,  “la palabra prohibida” episode

It is crucial to continue to understand the power of our voices, housed in their expression and their sound. (Im)migrant communities have a wealth of knowledge in their lived experiences, and they tell it well through these digital and public spaces, showing us how knowledge is produced not only through words and sounds, but in the powerful relationship between them.  By further amplifying immigrant voices in new sites, both “traditional” and digital, I continue the important work they have begun, helping us to realize where and when the power of our sounds resonates as a catalyst to mobilize people beyond perceived borders, where we all have the right to migrate and the right to just be.

Featured Image by Flickr User Claudia A. De La Garza, 5-6-06

Nancy Morales is a faculty lecturer for the Latina/o Studies minor in the Center for the Study for Culture, Race and Ethnicity (CSCRE) at Ithaca College. Morales has research interests in U.S third world feminist theory, immigration policy, labor relations, critical ethnic studies, cultural and sound studies. She focuses on how Latina/o workers and immigrant workers have been excluded from the ranks of the working-class because of their racial, cultural, gender and immigration-status differences. She received a B.A. in Social Psychology from UC Santa Cruz and a Master’s from Cornell’s Institute for Public Affairs with a minor in Latina/o Studies. Morales has done research for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and for the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) in order to further explore how race and gender become necessary for understanding workers’ struggles within the Immigration, Labor, and Civil Rights Movements.

Óyeme Voz”: Comunidades Latinas y Inmigrantes de EE. UU. Resuenan Ciudadanía y Pertenecer 

Post by Nancy Morales.  Translation by Martha Unzueta-Perez, m.unzueta.perez@gmail.com

Mis experiencias recientes—tanto dentro como fuera de la academia—como una ciudadana de Estados Unidos con una educación “Ivy League” lo hace muy claro que soy una mujer de color que siempre va ser criminalizada por el estado sin importar cuantos “privilegios” adquiero o creer haber obtenido a través de mi “trabajo duro.”  Yo no puedo continuar mi camino hacia la autodeterminación sin reconocer que los privilegios que adquiero no me garantizaran mi protección y mucho menos mi liberación.  En otras palabras, las personas de color son perpetuamente vulnerables sin importar su educación, riquezas y/o estatus social.   En “Speaking in Tongues: A letter to Third World Women Writers” en  This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Gloria Anzaldúa explora esta noción en su carta a escritoras del tercer mundo, donde expreso que nunca hemos tenido ningún privilegio y nunca lo tendremos (165).  Anzaldúa hace esta declaración no para anular nuestros sueños sino más bien para hacer posible nuestra liberación; en esencia, no tenemos nada que perder al imaginar otras formas de ser.  Si fuéramos a actuar como el imaginado ciudadano ideal de Estados Unidos bajo las normas hetero-normativas (racial, genero y sexualidad, incluyendo señales sónicas de la ciudadanía), siempre seria al costo de desplazarnos el uno al otro.   El privilegio a menudo es mal entendido como una forma de protección de desplazamiento y una reclamación de merecimiento como seres humanos.

Amplificar y extender la resonancia de la poderosa declaración de Anzaldúa, mi trabajo académico me ayuda personalmente a sanar porque yo busco a entender los modos de producción de conocimiento: cómo la investigación significativa es emprendida y actualizada, particularmente por y para las comunidades de inmigrantes, al explorar cómo estos grupos nos ayudan a imaginar nuevos y aún desconocidos territorios donde nuestras diferencias son validas.  Los Jornaleros del Norte, Radio Ambulante y otras personas de los derechos de inmigrantes proporcionan ejemplos de imaginarse otras formas de ser, incluyendo la producción de señales sónicas de la ciudadanía que no son sancionados por el estado.  En otras palabras, están haciendo el trabajo de conocerse mejor para respetarse y entenderse.  Frecuentemente, alguna de la producción de conocimiento más importante ocurre a través de la materialidad de los sonidos y los impactos materiales de las prácticas de escuchar tanto dominante y resistente.

Rallying the Crowd with a Bullhorn, Arizona SB 1070 Protest, May 2010, Image by Flickr User Xomiele

Rallying the Crowd with a Bullhorn, Arizona SB 1070 Protest, May 2010, Image by Flickr User Xomiele

La ciudadanía es (mal) entendida como un privilegio que garantiza la protección por la nación-estado.  El discurso dominante actual de la nación-estado de la seguridad nacional crea una legislación draconiana federal, estatal y local que desmienten las diferencias de los inmigrantes. La creciente retórica anti-inmigrante intenta homogeneizar tanto los latinos e  inmigrantes como criminales.  En otras palabras, tal discurso es utilizado para justificar la nación-estado como un punto de referencia para reconocer una comunidad legitima. La agenda del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional considera quien puede ser tolerable y quien puede ser deportado, aún si usted es un ciudadano estadounidense. Distinguir, por ejemplo, entre los estudiantes excepcionales que “merecen estar aquí” y aquellos que no, crea una jerarquía de los inmigrantes. Consecuentemente, el discurso publico sobre el merecimiento de reconocer y pertenecer que categorizan a los inmigrantes en maneras restrictivas. Similarmente, los ataques contra la educación bilingüe y los estudios étnicos  intentan desplazar a los latinos como extranjeros y “alien” en los territorios estadounidenses.

El artículo “The Noise of SB 1070: or Do I Sound Illegal to You?” de Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman proporciona ejemplos sónicos de discriminación para revelar como la ciudadanía se construye aún más a través del sonido. El oído dominante, como Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman revela:

Como las normas racializadas sobre el sonido existen y circulan a través de la cultura popular. Como resultado grupos dominantes utilizan el sonido con impunidad parar forjar una “sospecha razonable” sobre el estatus de la ciudadanía de cualquier persona que se escucha diferente a ellos y que crea, consume y aprecia los sonidos de manera diferente a ellos (5).

Más importante nosotros aprendemos que las señales sónicas de ciudadanía son tan poco fiables como los biológicas/físicas, es decir discriminación racial. Uno puede tener un acento o hablar español pero eso no demuestra su estatus de ciudadanía. Sin embargo, lo que nosotros entendemos de manera más prominente es las diferentes formas en que la gente de piel morena es desplazada a través del racismo estructural tal como señales sónicas de la ciudadanía.

Image by Wikipedia

Image by Wikipedia

Para entender más completamente el legado de la conquista de EE.UU. de America Latina y el Caribe—de cual la retórica contemporánea anti-terrorista y anti-inmigrante son una extensión—nosotros debemos reconocer cómo los colonizadores utilizaron el lenguaje como un arma que pude avergonzar, humillar y colonizar aun más a la gente de color. bell hooks atestigua a esta noción en “Teaching New Worlds/New Words” del Tongue-tied: The Lives of Multilingual Children in Public Education: el ingles estándar no es el habla de exilio. Este es el lenguaje de conquista y dominación en los EE.UU.” (255).  A menudo empezamos a pensar que podemos adquirir privilegios de movilidad hacia arriba, clase, ciudadanía o raza como nuestra fuente de protección, en particular “pasando” lingüísticamente (Anzaldúa, “Linguistic Terrorism” Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 217). Sin embargo, cómo Anzaldúa explica en “How to Tame a Wild-Tongue” de Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza: “Hasta que yo pueda tener orgullo en mi lenguaje, no puedo tener orgullo en mi mismo.  Hasta que yo pueda aceptar como legitimo el español chicano tejano, tex-mex y todos los otros idiomas que hablo, No puedo aceptar la legitimidad de mí mismo” (81).  Deborah Vargas’s 2012 libro Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (University of Minnesota Press) también explora estas cuestiones y llega a un momento importante para continuar a aprender como el poder de empujar los limites de las normas hetero-normativas  pueden ser entendidas en la cultura chincan@s-latin@s. Al descolocar el dominio del ingles estándar y reconocer la multiplicidad de los lenguajes que hablan y buscan escuchar,  chican@s-latin@s pueden comenzar a reconocer su riqueza de conocimiento como significativo en vez sin sentido.

NDLON Banner, Image by Flickr User NDLON

NDLON Banner, Image by Flickr User NDLON

Sonidos Significativos: Dignidad y Respeto

Es importante, luego, reconocer el trabajo crítico que las comunidades de derechos de inmigrantes crean que empuje los límites del oído dominante, particularmente a través de la inclusión de las materialidades vocales de la gente de color.  Tales grupos de derechos de inmigrantes movilizan los sonidos de las voces de los inmigrantes no como una forma neoliberal de  “demostrar su merecimiento” pero, como Sebastien de la Cruz, el niño de diez años de edad de San Antonio que canto el himno nacional para el tercer juego de la final 2013 del NBA en su traje de mariachi, ellos utilizaron el sonido para crear y amplificar una justa presentación que vocalmente resiste binarios dominantes de extranjero/ciudadano, ilegal/legal.

Los Jornaleros ofrecen a la gente su talento y su amor con su música de resistencia y lucha

Los Jornaleros del Norte es un grupo musical que fue formado de las luchas de los jornaleros. Ellos son parte del National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) donde ellos realizan sus culturas y lenguajes como formas de resistencia. Ellos cantan canciones en español en las protestas, en mítines, en el radio y en todos otros espacios públicos.

En este clip, Los Jornaleros interponen sus voces para denunciar las deportaciones, el robo de salarios y energizar los deseos de las familias in(migrantes). A través de actuaciones animadas y la circulación de Internet, este grupo amplifica las voces actuales de la gente directamente afectada por las políticas de inmigración y se niegan a ser silenciados por el oído dominante Americano.

Además, organizaciones como el National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) y Education for Fair Consideration (E4FC) utilizan varias herramientas de organización para amplificar las voces de las comunidades de inmigrantes.  Junto y en solidaridad con E4FC, una red de artistas, escritores y cineastas, incluyendo Favianna Rodríguez, luchan activamente para una reforma de inmigración justa utilizando el sonido. Estos artistas son cruciales para la defensa y protección de los derechos de inmigrantes y por cambiar los discursos dominantes sobre inmigrantes que son vistos sin dignidad. Por ejemplo, La Santa Cecilia, una banda local en Los Ángeles comprometida a la cuestiones de justicia social, colaboro con la organización NDLON para producir una canción en español en el que el video musical muestra las personas afectadas por las políticas poco acertadas.

“ICE/El Hielo”—una obra de teatro multilingüe sobre las siglas de la Oficina de Inmigración y Aduana d EE.UU. (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)—combina una imagen visual de inmigrantes con una multiplicidad de lenguajes, estilos musicales  y tonos vocales  para ayudarnos a entender el trama y dolor que las comunidades de  inmigrantes perduran a diario debido al discurso dominante de la seguridad nacional que homogeniza a las comunidades latinas y (in)migrantes como menos que humanos. [Editor’s Note: La canción también puede escucharse y descargarse en el mix anual gratuito de Sounding Out! para el 2013. Haga clic aqui—JSA]

Prácticas como la de La Santa Cecilia animan a los latinos e inmigrantes—que a menudo se habla de ellos en vez de directamente hablar con ellos— a participar en espacios públicos, incluyendo espacios digitales.  Los espacios digitales, yo creo, pueden convertirse en potenciales espacios seguros que permite a las comunidades latinas e inmigrantes a producir su propio sonido y por lo tanto hacer una reclamación alternativa a pertenecer  que no se predica al hablar en ingles “estándar” y/o ser un ciudadano americano “real.” A través del alcance digital, el E4FC anima a la juventud indocumentada a compartir sus historias de inmigrantes sónicamente para conectar los temas de inmigración a un nivel global.

Mientras intervenciones musicales son efectivas, yo utilizo el resto de este articulo para hablar sobre las formas más matizadas en la cual las comunidades latinas e de (in)migrantes agregan el sonido de sus voces a discursos globales a cuentos, música y lenguaje(s) en maneras bellas (y a veces dolorosas) de contar.  Las comunidades inmigrantes producen y circulan sonido significante a ellos para contextualizar sus diferencias entre las comunidades latinas. En otras palabras, ellos empujan los límites de la ciudadanía a través de métodos de auto-organización que se escucha con dignidad y respeto para uno al otro. Yo sostengo que compartir sus perspectivas y historias—aquí y en otros lugares en el Internet—captura más que una picadura de sonido. El sonido de “voces cotidianas” movilizadas contra—y comentando sobre—los intentos de la nación-estado para marcar las comunidades inmigrantes como vulnerables causa una impactante y profunda agencia material.

Voz Mob Logo, Image by Flickr User RisetoMovement

Voz Mob Logo, Image by Flickr User RisetoMovement

Por ejemplo, Voces Móviles (VozMob), una colaboración entre La Escuela de Annenberg en Universidad del Sur  de California (University of Southern California’s Annenberg School) y el Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California (Institute of Popular Education of Southern California – IDEPSCA) utiliza la tecnología SMS para documentar la voces de los trabajadores inmigrantes en la Internet.

VozMob permite a los jornaleros y otras comunidades inmigrantes a utilizar sus teléfonos celulares como una herramienta para compartir sus perspectivas y convertirse en narradores de sus propias historias vía texto, imágenes y video.  Usuarios suben su contenido directamente a la pagina Web VozMob webpage donde uno puede leer, ver y/o escuchar sus experiencias diarias. En este videoclip Luis Valentán comparte su perspectiva como un jornalero sobre los derechos de inmigrantes.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/84067495]

Al rechazar la descripción de “Soñador,” Valentán sonora las diferencias entre las comunidades inmigrantes al animar a otros a reconocer que son “Hacedores.”  El también empuje los limites de un marco de derechos de inmigrantes que valora y respeta a las personas que luchan por una vida mejor que enfrentan oportunidades limitadas.

Radio Ambulante también crea un espacio digital para las voces de la gente de América Latina y de EE.UU.  Es el primer programa de radio en español que cuenta las historias donde la cultura y pertenecer no tienen fronteras. Los programadores transmiten varios episodios temáticos destacando historias que exploran diferencias mediante el uso del lenguaje primario. Este enfoque, como se escucho en el episodio de noviembre 2013 “la palabra prohibida,” permite a oyentes diversos a que escuchen a personas que comparten y, más importante, complican las nociones sobre culturas, orígenes y percepciones de querer pertenecer.

Radio Ambulante,  “la palabra prohibida” 

En “la palabra prohibida,” los locutores no hacen ningún intento a perfilar a los participantes del episodio como una en la dicotomía “buena” o “mala” de la narrativa de inmigrantes. En cambio, Radio Ambulante crea un medio sónico que yuxtapone las voces para hacer material de complejidad humano para sus oyentes.

Es crucial continuar a comprender el poder de nuestras voces, que se encuentran en su expresión y su sonido. Las comunidades (in)migrantes tienen una riqueza de conocimiento en sus experiencias vividas y lo dicen bien a través de estos espacios públicos y digitales, enseñándonos como el conocimiento se produce no solo a través de palabras y sonidos sino en la poderosa relación entre ellos.  Al amplificar aún más las voces inmigrantes en nuevos sitios, tanto “tradicional” y digital, yo continuo la importante labor que han iniciado, ayudándonos a realizar donde y cuando el poder de nuestros sonidos resuenan como un catalizador para movilizar a la gente mas allá de las fronteras percibidas, donde todos tenemos el derecho a migrar y el derecho de ser.

Nancy Morales es profesora en la especialización de estudios latinos en el Centro para el Estudio de Cultura, Raza y Etnicidad (Center for the Study for Culture, Race and Ethnicity – CSCRE) en el Colegio Ithaca (Ithaca College). Morales tiene intereses de investigación en la teoría feminista del tercer mundo de EE.UU., política de inmigración, relaciones labores, estudios étnicos críticos, estudios culturales y de sonido.  Ella se centra en cómo los trabajadores latinos y trabajadores inmigrantes han sido excluidos del los rangos de la clase obrera por sus diferencias raciales, culturales, del genero y el estatus inmigrante. Ella recibió su licenciatura en psicología social de la Universidad de California Santa Cruz y su maestría del Instituto de Negocios Públicos de la Universidad de Cornell (Cornell University) con una especialización en estudios latinos.  Morales ha realizado investigaciones para la Red de Organización Nacional de Jornaleros (National Day Laborer Organizing Network – NDLON) y para la Alianza Nacional de Trabajadores Domésticos (National Domestic Workers Alliance -NDWA) para poder explorar más a fondo cómo la raza y el género son necesarios para comprender la lucha de los trabajadores dentro de la inmigración, labor y el movimiento de derechos civiles.

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From Mercury to Mars: The Shadow of the Great Detective: Orson Welles and Sherlock Holmes on the Air

WelleswTower_squareI predict that one day an obsessed fan — maybe you, dear reader — will devise a complete and thorough catalogue of all the characters that Orson Welles ever played (or claimed to have played) on radio.

It would be a colossal, almost nonsensical list, a set of clues that expose an experiment in sheer artistic ego that was nearly criminal: Hamlet, The Shadow, Fiorello La Guardia, The Count of Monte Cristo, Rochester from Jane Eyre, General Zaroff from “The Most Dangerous Game,” Dr. Corey from Donovan’s Brain, Mr. Jingle from The Pickwick Papers, Martin Arrowsmith from Sinclair Lewis’s novel, Paul Madvig from Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key … and not just Joseph Conrad’s Marlow, but his Kurtz, not just Bram Stoker’s Seward but his Dracula.

To that list, we can also add another pair: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and his Moriarty, characters that Welles had apparently found compelling since his boyhood.

This week From Mercury to Mars, our series on the radio works of Orson Welles in conjunction with Antenna, continues with an exciting piece on the connection between Welles and Holmes by a new voice among Welles scholars. SO! is delighted to welcome A. Brad Schwartz, who co-wrote the recent PBS special on the “War of the Worlds” panic, based on his research in archives at the University of Michigan. Schwartz also has a forthcoming book on the subject.

But first, as promised, a detour to Baker Street.

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Perhaps lost among the many eulogies Orson Welles received after his death in 1985 was a brief nod in The Baker Street Journal—the “irregular quarterly of Sherlockiana” put out by the Baker Street Irregulars, America’s leading society dedicated to the study and appreciation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. It was through Welles’s work as a radio artist, they wrote, that “the Sherlockian world benefitted greatly from his talents” (Baker Street Journal 36, 1: 43)

A recent edition of the Baker Street Journal.

A recent edition of the Baker Street Journal.

The association worked both ways. Sherlock Holmes hovers over Welles’s radio work, popping up at key points as Welles pursued the stardom he would win with War of the Worlds. As Paul Heyer notes, Holmes’s stories bookended Welles’s remarkable career on the air, from his earliest experimentation with the medium as a student to his final radio performance in the 1950s (The Medium and the Magician 209). Even Welles’s most famous radio role before the War of the Worlds broadcast—the ethereal crime-fighter The Shadow—owed a considerable debt to the Great Detective, and to the formula Conan Doyle had pioneered. The interplay between Lamont Cranston, brilliant amateur detective, and Margot Lane, his plucky sidekick, shows clear echoes of Holmes and Watson. Those echoes were encouraged, perhaps, by the show’s first story editor, Edith Meiser, who produced a long-running and popular Sherlock Holmes radio series in the 1930s and 1940s that earned her the recognition of the Baker Street Irregulars at a time when they didn’t accept woman as members.

Welles’s radio work, apart from War of the Worlds, is too often reduced to a kind of transitional phase between his work in the theater and in film. But in this post, I want to take another approach, looking at the influence of the Holmes stories on Welles’s on-air career, thereby helping to shed light on his remarkable contributions to the medium. It was partly by learning from Conan Doyle’s example of great storytelling that Welles reshaped the rules of radio drama.

Welles’s dabbling in the gaslit world of Holmes and Watson can be traced, like so much of his later success, back to the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois. There Welles began in earnest his experimentation with film, theater and radio under the tutelage of schoolmaster Roger Hill, and with the school’s remarkable array of resources at his command. Welles first grabbed Hill’s attention, appropriately enough, on Halloween Eve, 1926—exactly twelve years before the War of the Worlds broadcast—in the guise of Sherlock Holmes. That night, according to Barbara Leaming, Welles took center stage dressed as Holmes in a show put on by Todd students, only to toss off his deerstalker cap and Inverness cape to reveal a flowing theatrical cloak (Orson Welles: a Biography 22). Then he launched into an elaborate magic show. Welles was eleven—“a cute little round-faced boy,” as Hill’s wife, Hortense, later described him—but his undeniable panache immediately registered with Hill. Indeed, that was the idea; Welles, already an inveterate seducer of adults, had set out to catch Hill’s eye, having sensed upon his arrival at this somewhat stuffy school that this youthful, energetic teacher was someone he could get along with.

Recognizing Welles’s potential, Hill would let the student essentially take over Todd’s drama department and turn it into his own repertory company. It was a major opportunity for Welles to stretch his creative muscles, and Hill gave invaluable shape and direction to Welles’s exploration. The school even had its own radio station, for which Welles wrote and performed his first radio dramas. The very first was a Sherlock Holmes adaptation written in about 1928, when Welles was thirteen. This show was apparently never produced, but it marks his first foray into the medium that would make him famous.

It’s not surprising that Welles’s first radio drama would be a work of fan fiction, and he could not have picked a better example of the craft of storytelling. Much of the pleasure of reading the Holmes stories comes from their first-person perspective. Dr. Watson is a magnificent storyteller, painting an affectionate if complex portrait of his friendship with Sherlock Holmes, and through him Conan Doyle establishes a genuine rapport with the reader. “[O]ne cannot imagine feeling gauche or ill at ease in Watson’s presence,” wrote the poet (and brilliant radio writer) Stephen Vincent Benét, in a paean to Holmes’s faithful companion, “the very thought of him is as stodgy and comfortable as a Morris chair” (“Dr. Watson” 154).

When, in 1938, Welles debuted his own radio series on CBS, The Mercury Theatre on the Air, it was similarly based around the power and intimacy of the first-person narrator. Its original title, First Person Singular, reflected Welles’s belief that radio was fundamentally a narrative, and not a dramatic, form, which worked best when the protagonist engaged directly with the audience. As Welles explained it to The New York Times: “When a fellow leans back in his chair and begins: ‘Now, this is how it happened’– the listener feels that the narrator is taking him into his confidence; he begins to take a personal interest in the outcome.”

That sense of intimacy between narrator and audience is a major part of what makes the Holmes stories work; readers come to trust Watson even when perhaps they shouldn’t. As author Max Allan Collins explains it, “Watson is not merely a reporter, but the human filter through whom the sometimes outlandish plots are made to seem more plausible.” (The History of Mystery 27). That he still exists in the minds of many fans not as a fictional character, but as a real person, is a testament to this effect, and Welles recognized its power when combined with that most intimate of media: radio.

Indeed, it wasn’t long before the Mercury Theatre found its way, in Welles’s words, “back to Baker Street,” with an episode entitled simply Sherlock Holmes on September 25, 1938. Rather than directly dramatizing any of the Conan Doyle stories, Welles instead adapted William Gillette’s 1899 play based on them. Welles had just come off of a spectacular failure in bringing another of Gillette’s plays, the ribald farce Too Much Johnson, to the stage, complete with filmed sequences that proved unique but impractical. These segments, Welles’s first professional film, were only recently rediscovered.

William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes

William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes

At the time of the Mercury broadcast, Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes was still the most popular and well-known adaptation of Conan Doyle’s stories. Gillette himself so resembled the detective, both physically and temperamentally, that he effectively became the character in the public mind. The lasting image we have of Holmes, as a willowy man in a deerstalker cap and Inverness cape, with a drop-stem pipe under his aquiline nose—the costume Welles wore that night in the Todd School in 1926—comes from Gillette, not Conan Doyle. “It is too little to say that William Gillette resembled Sherlock Holmes,” Welles said at the top of this broadcast. “Sherlock Holmes looks exactly like William Gillette.”

However, because it is a drama and not a narrative, the Gillette play lacks one key component of the Holmes formula: Dr. Watson’s narration. And so Welles, at the outset of his broadcast, had his Watson (Ray Collins) introduce himself to the audience and bring them into the story:

The monologue, like Welles’s introduction, is studded with Sherlockian references, some of them slightly obscure, suggesting its author had a real regard and affection for these stories. The authorship of the Mercury radio plays has always been contentious—this was before Howard Koch joined the staff, so Holmes was likely a collaboration between Welles and his producer, John Houseman—but one thing is clear: the addition of Watson’s monologue to Gillette’s drama is Welles’s theory of the “first person singular” at work.

If there’s one wrong note in the show, it’s the lead actor. Welles as Holmes sounds bored and effete, with the affected accent of a young man desperate to hide the fact that he’s from Wisconsin. Because Welles’s Sherlock lives in the upper register of his voice, he cannot use the full basso profundo power of his instrument, and so comes off sounding airy, disinterested and inauthentic. This is the voice of the foppish playboy Lamont Cranston, not the manic detective Sherlock Holmes. Compare, for example, a clip from the Mercury broadcast with Gillette playing the same scene two years before. Even at the age of eighty-two, and just one year before his death, Gillette’s Holmes has more verve than the twenty-three-year-old Welles’s:

Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, an 1893 illustration by Sidney Paget in Strand Magazine.

It would be fourteen years before Welles returned to Baker Street on the radio, but when he did it was in the perfect Sherlockian role for his remarkable voice—not the detective himself, but his nemesis: Professor Moriarty. Welles apparently liked to play opposing characters; in the first Mercury broadcast, he’d performed as both Count Dracula and Dr. Seward, and played both Marlow and Kurtz in his adaptation of Heart of Darkness. But as an actor, particularly on the radio, Welles was more convincing in sinister roles than in heroic ones, partly because of his deep voice, and partly because playing a villain allowed him to cloak himself comfortably in melodrama. Even his radio heroes, like The Shadow and Harry Lime, have more than a touch of menace about them. When it came to playing Holmes and Moriarty, it should be no surprise that he did better as the latter than as the former.

By 1952, Welles was in England, working with producer Harry Alan Towers on a couple of radio series, including one based on his character from The Third Man (1949). Towers wanted Welles for the lead in a Sherlock Holmes series he was producing for the BBC, but Welles, struggling to complete his film of Othello (1952), was too busy. All Welles could manage was a guest slot as Moriarty in the last episode: an adaptation of the Conan Doyle story “The Final Problem,” in which the author famously tried (and failed) to kill off his detective.

Opposite John Gielgud as Holmes and Ralph Richardson as Watson, Welles gives one of his best performances as a radio actor, fully exploiting the lower register of his voice to imbue his Moriarty with just the right amount of menace. His interplay with Gielgud is fast-paced and witty, easily establishing that these are two characters of equally phenomenal intelligence, but also painfully polite. The ambivalent tone of Welles and Gielgud’s banter makes clear that their Holmes and Moriarty regard each other very highly, and are almost sorry to be stuck on a collision course.

John Gielgud as King Henry IV in Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1966)

John Gielgud as King Henry IV in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1966)

Both the Mercury and the BBC shows both contain a nearly identical scene in 221b Baker Street, drawn directly from Doyle’s story, in which Holmes and Moriarty, each fingering a pistol in his pocket, have a polite conversation and decide that they can’t go on long without killing each other. It’s loaded with tension and is one of the best scenes Doyle ever wrote, but it falls flat in the Mercury broadcast. Not only is Welles miscast as Holmes, his Moriarty (Eustace Wyatt) crosses too easily into the realm of a snarling Saturday matinee villain.

By contrast, Welles and Gielgud read their lines with a fair amount of humor, but their performances retain a high level of dramatic intensity. Their restraint makes the scene much more dramatic, and their chemistry, at least in these roles, is much stronger than Welles and Wyatt in the Mercury version.

Sherlock Holmes survived the fight at the Reichenbach Falls, of course; Professor Moriarty did not. Likewise, “The Final Problem” marked Orson Welles’s last appearance in a radio drama. It was a fitting end not just for Moriarty but for the radio career of an actor and director who had done so much for the medium, and who owed at least some of his success to fiction’s greatest detective: Sherlock Holmes.

Orson Welles as Cagliostro in Black Magic (1949)

Orson Welles as Cagliostro in Black Magic (1949)

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A. Brad Schwartz co-wrote an episode of the award-winning PBS series American Experience on the War of the Worlds broadcast, based in part on research from his senior thesis at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is currently writing a book on Welles and War of the Worlds for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, to be published in 2015.

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From Mercury to Mars is winding down it’s long career on Sounding Out! Stay tuned for a few new posts from Antenna, as well as a special post  by renowned film scholar Murray Pomerance on this site in the coming weeks to wrap things up.

New to the series? Check out some of the many places we’ve visited while chasing down radio’s greatest magician.

  • Here is “Hello Americans,” Tom McEnaney‘s post on Welles and Latin America
  • Here is Eleanor Patterson‘s post on editions of WOTW as “Residual Radio”
  • Here is “Sound Bites,” Debra Rae Cohen‘s post on Welles’s “Dracula”
  • Here is Cynthia B. Meyers on the pleasures and challenges of teaching WOTW in the classroom
  • Here is Kathleen Battles on parodies of Welles by Fred Allen
  • Here is Shawn VanCour on the second act of War of the Worlds
  • Here is the navigator page for our #WOTW75 collective listening project
  • Here is Josh Shepperd’s post, “War of the Worlds and the Invasion of Media Studies” 
  • Here is Aaron Trammell‘s remarkable mix of the thoughts of more than a dozen radio scholars on “War of the Worlds.”
  • Here is our podcast of Monteith McCollum‘s amazing WOTW remix
  • Here is “Devil’s Symphony,” Jacob Smith‘s study of the “eco-sonic” Welles.
  • Here is Michele Hilmes‘s post on the persistence and evolution of radio drama overseas after Welles.

Me? Why I’m your host, Neil Verma.