Writing American Cultures Studies of Identity, Community, and Place

Writing American Cultures Studies of Identity, Community, and Place edited by Sam Schrager The Evergreen State College Press Olympia, Washington 2013 Copyright © 2013. All rights remain with the authors of the individual essays. Writing American Cultures: Studies of Identity, Community, and Place, edited by Sam Schrager, consisting of narrative non-fiction essays by students from the academic program Writing American Cultures (2011-2012) at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington Published by: The Evergreen State College Press Olympia, Washington All photographs were taken by the authors. Design: Steven Hendricks & Aleks Paschenko Typefaces include Goudy Old Style, Constantia, and Gill Sans Hosted in e-book form by The Evergreen State College Library http://library.evergreen.edu/studentworks/writing-american-cultures.html The creation of this anthology was for a non-profit academic purpose. Except for public figures or where permission has been given, names of persons in these essays have been changed. This edition of Writing American Cultures is available through The Evergreen State College Library website on a print-on-demand basis. CONTENTS Introduction by Sam Schrager Through (Un) Disciplined Eyes vii Ataya Cesspooch Virtual Reservation: NDNs in the Digital Age 1 Linna Teng Khmao Euy Khmao: Colorism Amongst Cambodian Americans 33 Auricia Guardado El Viaje Que Cambio Mi Vida: A Life-Changing Journey to Central America 59 Jack Sukimoto JA/LA: Shifting Meanings of Japanese American Identity, Culture, and Community 89 Olivier Matthon Under the Radar: Notes from the Wild Mushroom Trade 121 Meredith Hobrla ABCs of Dirtbag Climbers: The Scene in Joshua Tree National Park 159 Kyle Sullivan-Jones Joey’s Voice: Family and Community Support for Students Diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder 193 Melanie Curran Lived-In Experiences of Architecture in New Orleans 221 Writing American Cultures Studies of Identity, Community, and Place v Introduction by Sam Schrager Through (Un)Disciplined Eyes Sam Schrager Through (Un) Disciplined Eyes Imagine giving students the chance to dig deep into some corner of everyday life that fascinates them. To get ready, they learn how to do fieldwork and write a research proposal. Then they go off for ten weeks to talk with folks, absorb what’s happening around them, and document what they see and hear. They report on their study weekly to peers and faculty. By the end, many are able to craft a narrative that takes a fresh look at their topic from an original point of view. This book consists of eight top-notch essays from such projects, composed by students in my ethnography seminar in the Writing American Cultures program at The Evergreen State College in 2011-2012. It shows that with time, guidance, and an open horizon of possibilities, undergraduates can tap into culture-at-the-present- moment in ways that are revelatory and a pleasure to read. A few words about how the contributors treat their topics: Ataya Cesspooch considers how Native people are building community—a “virtual reservation”—through the Internet. Her essay looks at a range of videos on YouTube, what their makers think about the interplay of innovation and tradition, and how such representations affect viewers. Ataya includes scholarship about new media and the long history of Indian appropriation of technology, and she reflects on implications of this emergent creativity for the future. ix Sam Schrager Linna Teng explores the experience of skin color preferences in her Cambodian American community. Interviewing kin, friends and others, she draws out frank feelings about the negative connotations of being khmao (black), insecurities young women face as a result, and their striving for self-affirmation. Linna links her study to scholarship on the transnational phenomenon of colorism. She fills out the picture with autobiographical snapshots and observations on generational change. Auricia Guardado visits relatives in El Salvador and Honduras, hoping “to put together the missing pieces of my identity.” Her Tia Anna, family matriarch, regales Auricia with surprising history. The search leads to unsettling conversations with her father and mother, who speak about the terror of the Salvadoran Civil War, their flight to the U.S., and their divergent feelings about living here. Auricia’s narrative traces how she comes to terms with her new knowledge. Jack Sukimoto returns to Los Angeles, which he’d left with his parents while still a child, to learn about cultural change and continuity in the Japanese American community. With perspective from kin and x Through (Un) Disciplined Eyes acquaintances, his unease about tradition disappearing gives way to subtler considerations of identity and meaning. Jack finds institutions (basketball!), practices, and hybrid identities which sustain aspects of Japanese American life despite geographical and cultural dispersion. Olivier Matthon, who often works in the woods, seeks out the wild mushroom picking circuit, which exists “under the radar.” At a motel in Willits, California, he becomes friends with a buyer and observes how this man interacts day after day with pickers, most living at the economic margin. Olivier learns how to be a picker himself. His narrative captures the texture of the scene, including the moral code that supports this transitory workers’ community. Meredith Hobrla, who had spent extended stints as a “dirtbag” rock climber, revisits an old haunt, Joshua Tree National Park, to ponder the lure of the lifestyle. She makes new pals and plunges into the familiar round of adventure and socializing, this time with an ethnographic slant. Meredith’s narrative depicts the climbers’ quirky culture, the limits of their ideology of freedom, and her ambivalent past and present experiences. xi Sam Schrager Kyle Sullivan-Jones, who until recently worked as a paraprofessional with autistic students in Walla Walla, Washington, returns for a closer look. He documents the daily life of Joey, the outlook of Joey’s mother, and—with testimony from staff and administration— the chaotic climate in special ed classrooms. Kyle’s study describes structural reasons for the inabilities of schools to serve the needs of students like Joey and the exceptional efforts of families like Joey’s on behalf of their children’s well-being. Melanie Curran, attracted to New Orleans since her early teens, goes there to imbibe its vernacular architecture. She presents her own experiences of buildings that attract her along with some of the intimate and cultural meanings that they hold for folks she happens to meet. Melanie’s poetic takes evoke the atmosphere in these spots and are illustrated by whimsical watercolors. What strikes me about these essays as a group are the contributors’ personal positions vis-à-vis their research and writing. Most of them picked a community that was in some way theirs, with built- in advantages of knowledge and of ties with friends, kin, and acquaintances. Those who didn’t begin with such familiarity had other affinities that helped them enter the scene. All of the authors xii Through (Un) Disciplined Eyes displayed curiosity and open-mindedness about their topics, qualities that drew others to collaborate with them. They tested their own critical ideas about social relations, inequalities and values in dialogue with these folks. And they infused their own questing presence into their writing, and so became part of the stories they told. These essays seem to me as rich in insight, and in some respects surpass, what professional ethnographers might be able to uncover. Such a claim, I realize, cuts against the grain of academic wisdom. In American higher education, serious ethnographic research is the bailiwick of advanced practitioners in anthropology and allied disciplines. It is an activity for scholars, graduate degree candidates, and select undergraduate majors. There is a hierarchy of opportunity, involving specialized qualitative training in specific fields. But the training also involves a tradeoff. In adopting disciplinary preoccupations, ethnographers tend to become channeled into conventionalized ways of seeing the topics they study. This anthology asks: What is the liberating potential for undergraduates engaging in ethnography? As my teacher Dell Hymes, noted anthropologist and folklorist, pointed out, professional xiii Sam Schrager ethnographers do not have privileged insight. Like everybody else, we need to make sense of others’ situations and reckon with the partiality of our own perspectives. Hymes believed that “ethnography has the potentiality for helping to overcome division of society into those who know and those who are known.” This is because ethnography is, at its root, “an extension of what every human being must do, that is, learn the meanings, norms, patterns of a way of life.” He said that educational institutions should cultivate this capacity by offering as many people as possible “some disciplined understanding of ethnographic inquiry” that they can apply in “their vocation whatever that might be” (98-99). The call, as I see it, is for persons in all sorts of circumstances (and not just in college) to have the chance to acquire this competence. Ethnography should be a democratic possession. To become broadly useful to members of a society, it has to be accessible rather than esoteric. It has to stay close to the ground of ordinary experience. It has to be generous in conception, expansive in reach. It won’t surprise me if some of the authors in this collection eventually have vocations as ethnographers or writers. I like to xiv Through (Un) Disciplined Eyes think that they, and many other students in the Writing American Cultures class, gained disciplined understandings of ethnographic inquiry that will prove useful to them as citizens and in whatever kinds of work they do. Our class was not made up of advanced majors in anthropology, folklore, or sociology. (Evergreen doesn’t have departments or formal majors.) These were freshmen through seniors with quite varied interests, enrolled in a wide-ranging, yearlong, full- time American studies program.

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