Source: grad.washington.edu

Academic fellowships are prestigious; and for graduate students who earn them, fellowships can help set the stage for illustrious careers. They are competitive. They come with money. They have titles like Fulbright and Ford.

But what really impresses people in and out of the academy is a Grammy Award—something that UW graduate student and Grammy winner Martha Gonzalez discovered at a job interview shortly after she took home the gold.

“Usually, when I talk about my music, people are like, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s nice.’ But upon mentioning the Grammy her band won, eyebrows shot up.

“This time, they were all, ‘What? Really?'” she said. “They know Fulbright. They know Ford Foundation. But the Grammy seemed to get more of a reaction.”

A graduate student in the UW’s Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies program, Gonzalez and her band, Quetzal, won the Grammy for best Latin rock, urban or alternative album. The song that gave their album its name, “Imaginaries,” takes its title from “The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History,” by Emma Perez. Gonzalez’s thesis advisor, Michelle Habell-Pallan, assigned this book in the first course Gonzalez took as a graduate student.

The book “completely inspired me,” Gonzalez said. “It made me think how, in artivistas circles, we’ve always done this same sort of imaginary work.”

The term artivista refers to artist-activists. Gonzalez’s dissertation, “Chican@ Artivistas: East Los Angeles Trenches Transborder Tactics,” focuses on the community of musicians in East Los Angeles who use their music as a social justice tool. As a member of this vibrant, intimate community, she was initially skeptical of attending the UW.

“The scariest thing about leaving a tight-knit community is going into an empty space,” she said.

And the UW was initially a very empty space for her.

“People are very nice, but they won’t take you in past ‘hello, nice to meet you.'”

Though she was enthusiastic about the department and felt like she had clicked with Habell-Pallan, Gonzalez had reservations.

“When you’re first walking through, the campus doesn’t look diverse. Some might argue that it just isn’t diverse. But there are pockets.”

GO-MAP (Graduate Opportunities & Minority Achievement Program) is one such pocket. Juan Guerra, a professor of English and then-director of GO-MAP, persuaded Gonzalez that the UW was the right school for her, after all.

“Meeting Dr. Guerra, I felt he understood me completely, where I was coming from. I felt safe, and I thought, ‘Well, if worst comes to worst, I can always come to GO-MAP and know that someone understands.'”

Through GO-MAP, she made more “connections like that, one by one.” And Gonzalez ended up creating some safe spaces of her own. She and her husband, Quetzal Flores, fellow band member and co-founder of Quetzal, established the Seattle Fandango Project, an organization that promotes community through music. She is also a founding member of Women Who Rock, a collaboration of local musicians and scholars and community activists, and a participant in the Women of Color Collective, an organization that promotes and supports diversity through grassroots organizing.

For Gonzalez, community-based connections are the key to success, academically, musically and personally. About the graduate school experience, she says, “Classes can be great. But if you don’t have a community, you won’t retain students.”

Gonzalez seamlessly integrates her own communities of academia and music performance.

“I’m lucky. I enjoy academia, I enjoy making music,” she said. “I navigate different worlds. If life is interdisciplinary, we need to be able to express that in our work as students and professionals in our field.”

Her experiences at the UW have reinforced that approach.

“Although theoretical discourse often tries to separate itself from practice, my professors have encouraged me to keep relating them to each other,” she said.

With her dissertation defense set for May—the last step in earning her doctorate—Gonzalez was able to leverage her music in her search for a faculty position. “Departments are seeing the value in academics who are also practitioners,” she said. And she proved this by recently landing a tenure-track assistant professor position at Scripps College.

And while the glitz of the Grammys seems like the antithesis to the formality of academia, Gonzalez has realized that embracing an integrated approach to academia also means embracing her identity as a Grammy winner—especially since it is an attention-grabber.

Going forward, Gonzalez expects to continue to be equally devoted to her music and academic study.

“I see the community of artist-musicians as an extension of my classroom and the way I’m going to teach,” she said. “I write and produce during the summer. The school year is like any other regular school year. I have a seven-year-old son who needs his schedule. I live that life; I love that life.”

Want to learn more about Martha’s music and academic research?

Martha’s recommended playlist:
Imaginaries – El Quetzal
Don’t Mess with the Dragon – Ozomatli
Que Pasa – Blues Experiment
Aztlan Underground – Aztlan Underground
Marisela – Monte Carlo 76
Maya Jupiter – Maya Jupiter
Barrio Roots – Quinto Sol
El Hielo – La Santa Cecilia

Martha’s recommend reading list:
The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Theories of Representation and Difference) – Emma Perez
Methodology of the Oppressed – Chela Sandoval
Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples – Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Research Is Ceremony – Indigenous Research Methods – Shawn Wilson
Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space – Mary Pat Brady
The Gloria Anzaldua Reader – Gloria Anzaldua, ed. AnaLouise Keating
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde – Audre Lorde
The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas – Diana Taylor

Photo by David Jewelz

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The Price of Women’s Immigration | Source: Harvard Gazette, May 1, 2013

By Sarah Sweeney

Quetzal Photo by Jon Chase

After it was over, the nightmares came: the sound of the thundering train, and the threat of gangs — including Los Zetas, Mexico’s most infamous cartel — that loomed at every turn.

Sometimes the dangers presented themselves randomly. Once, a branch swooped down. Sonia Nazario ducked just in time, but a child, farther back on the train, was whisked off, likely taken under the train’s unforgiving wheels.

Nazario was traveling from Honduras atop a speeding freighter alongside Central American migrants on the journey known as la bestia — the beast — or more grimly, perhaps more accurately, el tren de la muerte — the train of death.

In the name of research, she twice had volunteered herself for this trek, the kind that thousands of desperate migrants daily undertake, barreling through Mexico toward the United States on a train top, sleeping with one eye open, always anticipating robbery, rape, mutilation, and murder.

“The impact of immigration on the lives of women and children is rarely discussed,” said Radcliffe Dean Lizabeth Cohen as she opened the “Crossing Borders: Immigration and Gender in the Americas” conference last Thursday.

Day one of the conference began with a concert by Quetzal, a Grammy Award-winning rock band from East Los Angeles whose music takes up the social and political stories of struggling people; singer Martha Gonzalez participated in the opening night panel discussion. The conference tackled transnational identity, reproductive law, and the influence and impact of American society on immigrant children.

Nazario, who kicked off day two of the conference on Friday, is an immigrant herself. “I thought I knew something about determination,” she said, drawing from her parents’ relocations from Poland and Syria to Argentina, and from there to the United States, “but then a conversation in my kitchen with my housecleaner, Carmen, made me understand real determination.

“I remember one morning asking Carmen if she was thinking about having any more kids. She was normally very chatty, but when I asked her this question she went stone silent, and she explained to me that she had left four children behind in Guatemala,” recalled Nazario.

“She said she was a single mother, and her husband had left her for another woman. And she said that most days she could feed her kids once, maybe twice, and at night her children cried for hunger, and she had nothing to give them. She’d coax her kids to roll over in bed at night and she’d tell them, ‘Sleep face down so your stomach doesn’t growl so much.’ She told me how she left these kids with her grandmother while she came to work in Los Angeles, and she told me that she hadn’t seen these children in 12 years.

“Imagine not seeing your children for that period of time. She said her youngest daughter was a year old — still breastfeeding — when Carmen walked away from her. I remember being stunned by what she was telling me. Why are women willing to go 10,000 miles away from their home, not knowing when or if they would see their children again? And also, I had been taught, weren’t immigrants overwhelmingly men?”

Fifty-one percent of new immigrants to the United States are women and children, not men, said Nazario. They are part of the largest wave of immigration here since 1990, and many of the women have made the painful decision to leave their children for a train ride with no guarantees and a chance to make a better life for their families. A study by the University of Southern California estimates that four out of every five live-in nannies has a child left behind in home countries.

Nazario visited these women in their homes across the United States — including the mother of Enrique, the subject of Nazario’s book “Enrique’s Journey”; the woman had relocated to North Carolina. “A lot of these women were coming here and taking care of other people’s children, but they told me they were not there to see their children take their first steps, or hear their first words, or be there for their quinceañera,” she said.  

The consequences of a mother’s departure and women’s immigration are widespread, noted Nazario. Many kids, like Enrique, desperate to know if his mother really loved them, turn to drugs, develop emotional and developmental problems, and end up hating their mothers for leaving.

There are, of course, psychological repercussions for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States and contending with assimilation and the ongoing uncertainty about immigration reform.

“Americans in general are quite ambivalent about immigration,” said Mary C. Waters, the conference chair and the M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology.

“We’re quite proud of our immigrant ancestors, and quite proud of ourselves as a nation of immigrants, but quite worried about the new immigrants who are always arriving. I think that ambivalence runs deep in our society … Right now we’re at that pivotal crossroads. There are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. That is about the same number of African-Americans who lived in the South under Jim Crow racism before the Civil Rights Movement. These 11 million undocumented people have virtually no rights and live in constant fear of deportation, of their families being torn apart, and they are part of our society in almost every way except for having the civil rights that we all share.”

The conference was held in conjunction with a photographic exhibit, “Crossing Borders Images.” The exhibit is on view through Friday.

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