Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
We recorded this podcast conversation prior to Operation Metro Surge. This operation brought over 3,000 DHS ICE agents and other officials to the state. While the majority of DHS and ICE has been wreaking havoc in St. Paul in Minneapolis, the Twin Cities, they have also conducted raids across the state including in suburbs and in rural areas. While the federal government claims that they are going after quote the worst of the worst, on the ground we know that this is not true.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:They are going after families, people who are hard workers that contribute to Minnesota and The United States economy. They are going after schools where they are targeting children, staff and teachers. Many people do not feel safe. Many people are sheltering in place. We have a very strong network of solidarity where people across the state are organizing to fight back.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:There are mutual aid resources that are providing food, rent, and other utility bill relief to families. We have around 30,000 people who have been trained as constitutional observers who are following the law enforcement in roughly 77 of Minnesota's 87 counties. On February 4, Tom Homan said that he would be taking 700 agents out of the state. And while the national media seems to be covering what is happening in Minnesota less and less each day, on the ground, those of us who are here organizing know that nothing has changed. We continue to organize, we continue to protect our neighbors, and we continue to speak out against injustice.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:My hope is that by listening to this conversation that was previously recorded, we can learn from the lessons that Latina and Latinx artists who are also organizers have shown us about how to create coalition, how to enact Movidas, and how to continue to do work despite the sanctioned state violence. Rather than this concept of place making, which really perpetuates a settler colonial idea that nothing's there, so we got to go make something, placekeeping is a way to fight against gentrification. It's a way to fight against settler colonialism and to really say, No, everything we need is already here in the room, right? It's just time to organize those resources.
Kristie Soares:We're in a moment when making large movements is like putting a target on your back. So I would say everything I do all day, every day are small, subtle movidas.
Karma Chávez:I think there's something particular about the West that opens up the kind of possibilities for a lot of interracial, cross racial, cross cultural organizing.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Jessica Lopez Lyman. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota. I am talking today with two amazing colegas, Doctor.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Christie Soares and Doctor. Karma Chavez, about my book that came out in November 2025 from the University of Minnesota called Placekeepers, Latina, Latinx, Art Performance and Organizing in the Twin Cities. Today I have Doctor. Karma Chavez, who is the Bobby and Sherry Patton Professor of Mexican American and LatinaLatino Studies and Chair of the Mexican American and LatinaLatino Studies at the University of Texas Austin. And also joining us is Doctor.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Kristi Soares, an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Co Director of the LGBTQ studies at Colorado. Thank you all so much for being here.
Karma Chávez:Yeah, I'm super excited to be here. Thanks so much.
Kristie Soares:Thanks for having us.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:So I thought before we dig into the book a little bit and also about your research and the work that you all have been doing in your home places, we could just hear a little bit more about yourself. So, Karma, do you want to talk to us a little bit about more who you are and what brings you to this podcast with me today?
Karma Chávez:Yeah, absolutely. I'm down in Texas, what I like to call the great failed state of Texas, but it's also a good place to be doing the kind of work that I want to do. My work has largely been about social movements, thinking specifically at the intersections of immigration and queer politics. I also have secondary research streams that I've developed for protection around Palestine and critical race theory, as well as higher education. I'm actually writing a book on higher education right now.
Karma Chávez:I'm really involved in all of the attacks on higher ed that pretty much takes up all of my time right now. I'm also from the Midwest and think a lot about Chicanos and Latinos in the Midwest. So I had the great privilege of reading your book last year because I was a reviewer for your tenure and promotion case. Yeah, it's awesome. I can't wait to talk about it.
Karma Chávez:Excited to be here.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Thank you so much. And yeah, I remember the first time we met in Minnesota, I think it was snowing because it's always snowing. And I was just such an admirer of your work because I think, you know, a lot of times we talk about this idea of scholar activism and that word doesn't always sit right with me because I think, you know, it's not an addition into what we do when we're in ethnic studies. It's truly who we are supposed to be as academics in this discipline. And so I'm so grateful you're here today.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:I really admire how you navigate all of those spaces and can't wait to talk more about your book later, too, that you're writing on higher ed. Christy, love to hear more about you.
Kristie Soares:Sure. So I'm Kristie Soares. I'm from the great failed state of Florida, which I'll start saying now that Karma has introduced that terminology. I grew up in Miami, and I know that a lot of what we're going to talk about today is place keeping, the title of Jessica's book and one of her central analytics. So for me, coming from Miami is a big part of the work that I still do.
Kristie Soares:I am in a Women and Gender Studies department in Colorado. And my work is on queer and trans Latinx media broadly. I have a book that came out a couple years ago called Playful Protests, The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media, which looks at Cuban and Puerto Rican media properties made within the Mainland United States from the 1960s to the present, and the way that they're using Joy as a political affect. And my work now is actually on disco music in 1970s New York, And the way that that also is making maybe unexpected political meanings. And I also spend most of my time fighting the good fight for queer and trans studies, defending our discipline and our ability to teach it here in the state of Colorado and more broadly.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Yeah, I'm so excited you're here. It's kind of a full circle moment for me with Kristi. We went to graduate school at UC Santa Barbara together. We started a writing group with two other people for our dissertations. We managed to write our dissertations and pass, and then we kept at the writing group and we all wrote our books, or other folks got tenure on different, merits.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And so it's been a really cool opportunity to see over the course of fifteen years us struggle through the writing process and what it means to write a first book. And so, I want to talk a little bit about the book, then I thought we could dig into collective conversation. So, Placekeepers is a book that I never really intended to write when I was going to graduate school. I was really interested in critical race theory and performance. I was so excited to go to California.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:I was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. And so I was very much looking forward to getting out of the winter, to getting out of the Midwest. And when I went to UC Santa Barbara, I realized that they did not need another Chicana writing about California. There were already amazing people that do that work.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And I kept getting asked about the Midwest. A lot of my did not know, you know, that there were Chicanos, Latinos in the Midwest. When I was a mentor for an undergrad group, they gave me a certificate that said, The only Chicana in the Midwest. And I remember, one section we had when I was a TA, one of my undergrad students really, really, you know, sincerely asked like, Hey, do you know my cousin? He lives in Georgia.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And so that was just a real clear indication that I needed to write about where I come from, the occupied Dakota homelands, St. Paul and Minneapolis. And so I came back in 2013 and I did a dissertation about poets. And then I had an opportunity to do a postdoc at the University of Minnesota, and that's really where this book developed. It's my postdoctoral project, so it's not my dissertation.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And when I came back, you know, this was really the beginning, the height of BLM in 2013. And while Minneapolis is very internationally well known now because of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, A decade prior, I came home and Jamar Clark was murdered sixty one seconds after police arrived on the scene. Philando Castile was murdered, you know, a few years later. And so I was witnessing how all of these artists that many were, you know, in my friends, we were in neighbors, you know, neighborhoods together, we were in relationship together. People were really, really organizing.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And the other big kind of change that I saw when I moved back was how different the city looked. I wrote my dissertation at this place called Cafe Southside, which is in South Minneapolis. It was a queer and trans BIPOC owned coffee shop, and it disappeared. It no longer exists. They could not afford the rent.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And then our favorite place, Intermedia Arts, which if you ask an artist from the Twin Cities, you know, where they've done work before, almost every single person I know, regardless of the medium, will somehow have Intermedia Arts on their CV, and that place closed. And so we saw all this gentrification happening. And, you know, when we talk about social movements, so often our history really puts them in these very like bracketed siloed ways of talking. And in reality, that's not how we move as people. We're so complicated and we mesh into all these different spaces.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:So, this book traces through ethnographic research 10 Latina and Latinx artists who are from St. Paul or Minneapolis, or that's where they call home, to look at many different social movements. Of course, anti gentrification, police brutality, but then also unexpected things like going up to, the water protectors camp to fight against Enbridge's Line three. I never expected to write about oil pipelines or the climate, but that's where the work took me. And so, to trace this all out, I look at this idea of Movitas.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Movitas are theorized in Chicanx, Latinx studies by many amazing scholars that look at different moves. And one of the things that I was trying to figure out in this book is like, okay, Movita, we have this theory about how people are doing these subversive movements, but can we get even more specific? Because we talk about all the time, Oh, there's resistance or resilience, but like, what does that actually look like? And so each chapter of this book, Placekeepers, traces out a different Movida. The first chapter I call infiltration movidas.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:It's looking at how artists are infiltrating the government and nonprofit organizations to redistribute resources. The second chapter looks at improvisational movidas, how artists are running their own community spaces in the height of gentrification. The third Movita, the third chapter looks at inner Movitas or these like internal ways of self reflecting through the work of Afro Latina artist Lady Midnight. And then the final chapter is about interdependent Movidas, understanding how we are all intricately linked together in a way that is not voluntary. You know, my dependence for survival is as much linked with the rest of you and other non humans, right?
Jessica Lopez Lyman:We're looking at an entire ecosystem. And I look at that work through this Balance the Nation's hip hop tour that took place across the Mainland United States, as well as in Puerto Rico. And really at the end of the day, this idea of place keeping is a concept that is coming through to talk about how all of these different social movements, all of these different areas in the state and in the Midwest and even in places like Puerto Rico, folks are not wanting to stop living the life that they were meant to live and that in every place where people are, they have the gifts, the knowledges, the assets to truly live an abundant life. And so rather than, you know, this concept of place making, which really perpetuates a settler colonial idea that nothing's there, we got to go make something, place keeping is a way to fight against gentrification. It's a way to fight against settler colonialism and to really say, no, everything we need is already here in the room, right?
Jessica Lopez Lyman:It's just time to organize those resources. So that's an overview of the book.
Kristie Soares:Can I jump in? Please. You ended by saying everything here is already in the room.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:A little Laurie Carlos for you, right?
Kristie Soares:Yeah. So speaking of Laurie Carlos, who famously said that quote, I'm wondering if you can tell us about your genealogy, your theoretical and activist genealogy. Because through our time in grad school, I saw you get exposed, of course, to Chicana feminisms in your home department at UC Santa Barbara, but also to Black feminisms and Black feminist performance studies. And it seems to me that those are two of your central theoretical and activist pillars as you move through these concepts of movidas and placekeeping.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Yeah, I appreciate that question. You know, in undergrad, I went to an all women's college and one of my majors was English, but I only tried to take classes with the two black professors because it was the most radical curriculum that I could receive. And so, even though my degree is broadly English, I really feel like my degree was in African American literature and Black feminist thought. And I think growing up in Minnesota, where it was such a Black white paradigm growing up, that that was a really important theoretical lens, not only politically to ground myself in, but just also kind of reflected the reality of where I was. When I moved to Santa Barbara, I was able to work with people like Doctor.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Areida Hurtado, Doctor. Chella Sandoval, others who were really influential in Chicana feminisms. And so that conversation between Chicana feminism and Black feminist thought is something that weaves throughout the entire book, And I think is very critical when we're thinking about how are we creating movements that are sustainable, that are trying to not reproduce harm. You know, I think a lot of the work around abolition movement right now and thinking through transformational justice is really key in that work. And then the last kind of genealogy thread is that I'm an artist myself.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:You know, I grew up doing spoken word. I've known some of these artists in the book. For example, Maria Issa. She was 15 and performing for Be Girl Bee. And I was, you know, 16, 17 and Be Girl Bee was the very first hip hop conference for women by women in the country.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And I was up there doing spoken word. I look back today and I'm like, oh, please thank God there was not like TikTok or Instagram to document that moment of my life. But then I evolved into doing more performance art from people like Doctor. Stephanie Batiste, that you also work with Christy in Santa Barbara. And so that realm of being an artist has really been important too, and thinking through how do I understand what's happening in this space and how do I tell those stories?
Kristie Soares:I love that, and I feel like that is so central to your work, not only the political investments that extend out of Chicano feminisms and Black feminisms, but also your positionality as an artist and performer allows you to read the work of these artists and performers that you look at throughout the book in really complex ways. And that is one of my favorite things about your work. I think all of us, particularly when we come ourselves from marginalized communities that we are writing about, there's a subconscious desire to write stories of heroes. That's very compelling because the people we're writing about are fighting against huge social forces. But it's complicated.
Kristie Soares:You write about, for example, the fact that artists have to take money from local government programs sometimes, even if those programs are themselves contributing to gentrification. I think you write in really nuanced ways about the ways that artists exist within the capitalist system, artists exist within the creative economies, to use the term that you use in the book, that you borrow in the book. And it's not simple. It's not just doing good work and saying the right thing. It's also navigating through all of these power structures.
Kristie Soares:I think that's something you really draw out because you yourself have had to do it as an artist and performer.
Karma Chávez:So I'm wondering if I could pick up on another thread that I love about the work and I love about your work more broadly, which is the centeredness in the Midwest. I want to test a hypothesis with you to see what you think of it. So I lived in Madison for six years, so just down the road. And I was there 2010 to 2016, so very much in the height of the Ferguson moment and was really involved with a lot of organizing around Black Lives Matter at that time there. And one of the things I came to think about being in Madison was that there's something very special in particular about these Midwestern cities.
Karma Chávez:I mean, Madison's smaller obviously than the Twin Cities, but there's some similarity there. But it opens up the kind of possibilities for a lot of interracial, cross racial, cross cultural organizing that maybe doesn't happen in larger spaces in the same way. And I think it's not just about size. I think there's something particular about the Midwest contributes to this as well. So that's my hypothesis.
Karma Chávez:I feel like your book provides answers, but I'd love to hear you talk about that.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Yeah, no, I'm so glad you saw that in Madison too. And I think that when we talk about white supremacy in this country, it's so easy to just create this like blanket statement. I never saw myself as a regional scholar until I started doing Midwestern studies because somehow it seems to be very provincialized, you know? And one of the things I write about in the book is like how white supremacy manifests itself in Minnesota, and I think it's pretty true in Wisconsin too, is this idea of this pastoralism that really erases. And in the erasure of people of color, native people, It also provincializes us in ways that are reductionist and put in the historical past if you're native or, you know, subservient if you're folks of color.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:I think particularly in Minnesota, you know, we have a large refugee population of Somali folks, for example, who are being targeted right now. The way that white supremacy works here in this state and in the region oftentimes is like, we'll accept difference. We'll accept you in as long as you maintain your place. And what the Midwest loves to do is really tokenize a few folks of color to hold them up as the shining example, right? That you are wonderful and we think you are fantastic, but you don't represent the rest of your community because the rest of your community doesn't have it together.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And if more people start to mobilize from those communities, that's when things start to get unsettled in Minnesota in a way that's uncomfortable for the state powers. And so, I think that culturally, of course, to your point, there's the scale, right? They're just small. There's not that many of us. The Twin Cities in particular is very segregated because of racial covenants.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:But because of this culture of having to really fight against tokenization, of having to fight against isolation, we start to come together in ways that I think sometimes would be considered unconventional because they're cross tribal, cross racial, cross ethnicity. And those people who have been tokenized start to witness other groups who have also been tokenized. And I think through those conversations, we start to have solidarity in ways that are really beneficial for creating change. Of course, it comes with its whole host of issues. Like, let's not romanticize it.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Movement work is hard and messy and people are people. And so, there's a bunch of interpersonal drama at times, too. But generally speaking, one of the things I always try to talk to folks about is like the uprising in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd wasn't just random. And my book traces for ten years how artists in particular, like, for example, through rapid response murals, learn the skills to figure out how to do that. People were doing mutual aid, you know, for the pandemic, but even before then.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:These folks had these whole set of skills that they had been working on for generations that gets erased. And I think in particular in the Midwest, folks of color, Native folks have really had to hone those skills of movement work in a way that is different from other regions. What did you see in Madison?
Karma Chávez:Well, yeah, I mean, I totally agree with your analysis. I mean, I think that the tokenization is huge, but I really was surprised by the opportunity of organizing with the small number of indigenous folks who are active, another small black community in Madison, but very active and same with the Chicanos and Latinos. And even though there was strife, right, we had to figure out how to get along. And we also had to always step up for each other's issues because there just wasn't enough critical mass. And so I feel like for me, it was a great education.
Karma Chávez:I mean, there's reasons I left and for the weather, I'm glad I did. But I learned a lot about what this kind of diverse movement building can look like in a really hard context because people also don't realize, mean, you mentioned how segregated the twin cities are. It's the same in places like Madison and Milwaukee. In fact, Midwestern cities, even though the Midwest likes to think it's not racist, right? These cities have greater racial disparities than many of the cities in the South.
Karma Chávez:And that is, I think, part of the discourse that gets lost as well.
Kristie Soares:I have learned as well, I think a lot from you, Jessica, throughout the years because of this paradigm. And it's not a paradigm that I grew up with or was familiar with until I met you. And now I think we have an explosion of publications in Latinx studies about the Midwest. And I'm glad we do because it's putting this analytic it's not only regional knowledge, but it's putting this analytic in this particular way of organizing central and saying this should be central to the way we look at Latinx studies. So for me personally, coming from a majority minority place, Miami, so majority Latinx place and a place in which Latinx people hold almost all the power, the mayor, etcetera, etcetera, the congress people.
Kristie Soares:It's an entirely different kind of organizing. So when I met you and began to understand the way that interracial, inter ethnic, intermovement organizing occurs not as a matter of allyship, but as a matter of understanding interdependence to point toward your last Movida and your final chapter. That for me was an entire different way to do politics that I just had never had to learn because of where I was from. So I say this to say that I think your book is important in terms of understanding, organizing, having a testament to the organizing that has been done in the Twin Cities. But I also think it's important because it gives us a different central framework from which to operate as people doing activist work in Latinx studies.
Kristie Soares:Because the field has been so, as introduction says, so grounded in West Coast Chicana feminisms or East Coast Puerto Rican feminisms. And because those are ultimately, it's not to say that they're not multiracial movements. Of course they are, but they're not working in the same kinds of interdependent ways that I see in the Midwest through your work.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, I hope that through this book that people are able to take that no matter where they live. Because I think, again, you know, I'm like, I hope my book doesn't get provincialized with the rest where they just say, Oh, this is a Midwest Minnesota book. No, it was written in the spirit of wanting to really talk about artists and activists in a much broader way. And interdependence, I think, allows us to do that.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:One thing I would love to hear more about, you know, I have this concept of Movida that I theorized throughout, and I just think about the trajectory of both of your research and, work that you do in and outside of the academy. I would love to hear how Movitas function in your own life, you know, whether it's navigating higher ed, especially I'm thinking of all of the things I can't even imagine what you have to deal with as chair in Texas right now, or, you know, LGBTQ studies in Colorado and those attacks. But how do you use Movidas in the work that you have been doing?
Karma Chávez:I'll jump in and say, you know, it's interesting that a few years ago, it was going to be the fiftieth anniversary of the Center for Mexican American Studies here at UT. And we had selected the theme for the anniversary year to be Movitas. And it's a bunch of feminists, so we were excited about this. And oh my God, the Chicanosauruses, they flipped out on us. They wrote letters to us demanding that we please don't do this because Movita had such a dirty connotation.
Karma Chávez:It referred to the side piece that a man had, which of course, yeah, that's part of the fun of this history of the Movita, right? But it was really eye opening because some of the people, I won't name names here, but some of the people who were making these claims who did not want us to use the word Movira as the anniversary celebration, they weren't necessarily Chicana feminists themselves, but they had been responsible for the training of generations of Chicana feminists. Yet this was just like too much. And I think that's a sort of analog for the state of Texas in a certain way in how you're always kind of dis identifying or always sort of engaging in these infiltration movenas because if you put it out there, like we try to do with the anniversary, there's a lot of pushback, whether that's from Chicanos or whether that's from white folks or whatever. And so as we've been navigating all the bullshit, like we're probably going to get consolidated all the ethnic and gender studies into one large department.
Karma Chávez:And who knows what else that's gonna come with, but in navigating how to fight that, right? We can be overt in some ways, but in Texas, we've also had the laws that have been passed that have completely gutted the meaning of tenure. And while it hasn't yet been used at UT Austin, it's been used all over the state. There's been some 90 cases of people with tenure being fired at Texas public universities. And so the Movina is like the strategy, right?
Karma Chávez:And that's one of the things that's really helpful. I was thinking today before this, was like, I actually need to do a reading group with maybe just your introduction and start getting people thinking about these different kinds of Movitas and how we can apply them to our context.
Kristie Soares:Yeah, that's so interesting to hear you say that, Karma, because I think at this moment in 2025, everything is movidas. And maybe ten years ago, it wasn't. Like, years ago, we could still do movimientos. That is dead. Of course, there's still movements, but it's just in a white supremacist state that's so clearly fascist.
Kristie Soares:It behooves one to make small moves. And that to me is how Jessica's defining Movida as I'm reading from your interest or from your preface small subtle undercut over movements that when multiplied are powerful tactics for building large scale social change. Of There have always been, you say, Chicana feminists have always theorized. There are always small, subtle movements that are part of larger social movements. But I think we're at a moment, and that's why your book just gets so timely.
Kristie Soares:We're in a moment in 2025 when making large movements is like putting a target on your back. So, I would say everything I do all day, every day are small, subtle movidas. And it's lucky that we are literally scholars of power because that is what is required in this moment is to be a scholar of power to understand how your Movida is going to be understood by each party here in the state of Colorado. So, we're historically a purple state, now a blue state, but not a particularly progressive state. So in some ways, Colorado has a different regional history than the Midwest, but I do think it has something in common regionally with the Midwest in terms of what Jessica terms, the whiteout effect, the way that whiteness sort of, not just as a weather phenomenon in the terms of snow, but also in terms of the pervasiveness of whiteness in the national or in the state imaginary kind of wipes out other forms of racial identification.
Kristie Soares:So it's similar in that we're just celebrating thirty years of my program, which used to be called LGBTQ studies. Now it's called queer and trans studies. And we're doing really great stuff, but it all relies upon us making subtle movidas. We can't do anything big. We renamed our program Queer and Trans Studies, which was a political move, but also is pretty risky because it has the word trans in it.
Kristie Soares:And there is a certain safety to hiding behind terms like LGBTQ, for example. Acronyms like LGBTQ. So yeah, I would say I think right now your theorization really rings true with me, Jessica, because all any of us, in my experience, can really do is make very small moves toward liberation in this time period. How does it work for you in Minnesota?
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Yeah, I really resonate with both of what you all are saying, you know, karma about being consolidated. It's something that I feel like since I started at the University of Minnesota, we've always actively had to be mindful of. The department in which I'm part of was created in 1971 after students like Cremona Arrigine de Rosales and others that were part of the Latin Liberation Front took over Morrill Hall. And in 'seventy two, in that fall, the department had its first class. So we're over 50 years old.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:We still today are the only department in the Midwest. There are programs, but they're not departments. And for many, many decades, we only had one, one point five FTE. We have this great center on campus, RIDGES, Race Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, Sexuality Studies. And my fear always is that we will start to have that center lay the groundwork for consolidating ethnic studies and our feminist studies program.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And we all do very different work. And I think for me, that's what's so exhausting is like, why are we always fighting to be in survival mode? When I sit on all of these dissertations from philosophy to geography to, you know, education and People bring me in as the committee member that will be like, actually Chicanan, black feminism is a real school of thought. Like it is theoretically sophisticated. But anyways, I sit on these committees with really fantastic grad students and I just think like, wow, this is where other disciplines are.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Like intersectionality is still radical. And it's tiring because I feel like the academy clips our wings from really flying and thinking of, you know, what is necessary to solve the problems that we have in this world. And I truly believe that ethnic studies is our path towards liberation. And so we have to really fight for it. But that means that, of course, it's terrifying for people, who misunderstand what our discipline does.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And so I think that, you know, for me, the life is constantly a Movida. We also have such limited resources that I feel like the Rescuache aesthetic of always making do with what's at hand is something that we have had to do for survival and necessity, but it also has allowed us to be really innovative in how we try to build programs or movements. So, one of the things I was thinking a lot about, you know, is just like we're constantly, regardless of like what area of life we're talking about, having to work to maintain or to keep what we have, whether it's our traditions, our cultures, our stories, our physical home. Right now, it is going to be below zero this weekend in Minnesota and ICE is out and not the weather ICE, the customs enforcement agents are out and they are patrolling and terrorizing our Somali and Latino communities here in the Twin Cities. They are taking people regardless of having papers or not.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And I think about like, how do we keep each other safe? How do we keep our, ways of being safe? And I think that that's, you know, one strategy that I hope placekeeping is able to theorize for the work that people are already doing in their lives. So I'm just curious besides, you know, these Movitas, when you think about the idea of place keeping, do you all have any stories from your walk of life where you see this happening or you yourself are actively trying to keep the places? Obviously departments karma is huge, right?
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Don't consolidate that. But other ways that this is showing up.
Karma Chávez:I mean, I'll say something that maybe takes the concept of place keeping and expands it a little bit to think about the context in Texas. And so I have always been a big fan of us taking up a lot of space on the place of the university campus because it's our campus too, right? And most of our campuses have been engines of gentrification. UT had horribly moved out entire black communities in order to expand into East Austin. And there's communities in East Austin, white and black folks together who actually bought up all this land so that UT couldn't move any further as a strategy.
Karma Chávez:But with the end of, I mean, as flawed as DEI programs are and were, with the end of DEI on UT's campus, it's actually made it very, very challenging to hold space on campus because unless you're a registered student group that is connected to, say, an identity group, you cannot reserve space, you cannot host speakers, anything like this. And like a lot of the groups got disbanded because they used to be it doesn't matter. There's a lot of details there. And then we had the Palestine protest in 2024. And, you know, the police infiltrated our campus on two separate days.
Karma Chávez:In the course of a week, over 150 people were arrested. And that turned this place into a space of trauma and violence for a lot of students. But one of the things that happened was there's this Baptist church across the street. And I walked by that Baptist church, I don't know, 150,000,000 times over the course of my time here. Never thought twice about it.
Karma Chávez:But on that first day of the protest, that pastor, that church opened the doors and just ushered the students in, and held space for them. And ever since then, that's our spot. So anything we can't do at the university, we do there. They host a weekly dinner for students and faculty. We wanted to build out a fund for international and migrant students.
Karma Chávez:And the church was like, No problem. They sponsored the fund. A lot of their members donated to it. And then once that church did that, I was looking around campus. I was like, There's all sorts of churches on this campus.
Karma Chávez:And so then I started reaching out to the other pastors. And there's a church literally two doors down from me. Again, walked by it a 100 times, seen it, never thought twice about it. But I just cold called the pastor and I said, Hey, I'm doing this thing for AAUP. We can't do anything on campus anymore.
Karma Chávez:And she just like, again, welcomed us with open arms. And so I've started to think about these spaces that to me historically, I'm just kind of like, no, thank you, are now these places that are helping us engage in the practice of placekeeping because for whatever reason, churches have a space here too on our public university campuses. So I think it's just sort of an interesting spin on some of the themes in your book.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:I love this. I feel like you've probably haven't been to church as much in your life as you probably have the past year, right? Just like in these spaces.
Karma Chávez:Absolutely. In fact, I'm reading some scripture or something in one of these churches on Sunday. I'm not a Christian, but, you know, I was like, of course, I'm willing to give back like this.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Yeah. That's beautiful. I love that example. What about you, Christy?
Kristie Soares:I love that example, too. That's so amazing. Yeah, I took it in a sort of a different direction that I'm curious to get your thoughts on, Jessica. So because my work is on diaspora and because the groups of Latinx folks that I write about consider themselves to be displaced from their land. And depending on the orientation, can talk about the complexities of this.
Kristie Soares:Cubans and Puerto Ricans are very, very different politically in terms of this. But believe themselves to want to one day go back. So the idea of place keeping is, I think, really interesting when we're talking about, as you talk in your book and as Karma talks in their work, migration being not one directional. People move back and forth, particularly people with documentation, which is the case for Puerto Ricans, of course, who are US citizens and for many Cubans who received US citizenship or residency. Now, the case is different for Cubans arriving in The United States.
Kristie Soares:But, I think the idea of placekeeping is really interesting. When you refuse to claim a place as your own because of conditions of displacement. I wondered what you thought about that and how you saw that manifesting, if you saw that manifesting at all differently in the Puerto Rican artists that you talk about versus artists from different Latin American backgrounds. Yeah, no, I think that's
Jessica Lopez Lyman:a great question. I think that, you know, even within the Puerto Rican diaspora, there's so many nuances, and we're talking generations. One of the artists I look at is now a state representative, Maria Issa Perez Vega, but her parents were New Yorkans. Her dad fought in the Vietnam War. Her mother was very active nationally through the philanthropic circles and really infiltrated a lot of those rooms to bring more money to the community.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And so we're talking about like multiple generations removed, although through music, Maria Issa goes back to the island since she was very young where her family's from and learned Bomba and Plano from those folks. I was recently at the American Studies Association conference that was in Puerto Rico, and I was able to be there with Maria, her mom, who is, you know, a mentor of mine, Elsa Perez Vega, and their daughter, Louisa, who's named after the town Luisa. And it was the very first time I was actually able to leave San Juan and go to Luisa Rio Grande. We went to the rainforest, and it's a very different Puerto Rico. It is a black Puerto Rico, right?
Jessica Lopez Lyman:I was like, wow, this is such a better experience and what I was looking for than San Juan, which is just like just you can just feel colonialism everywhere you move. Anyways, I'm telling this long story to say, you know, that trip, which I recently took, which was after the book was already out, really solidified for me the importance that culture has in placekeeping. And so even though we're not talking about physical land like the island for somebody like Maria Issa, Bomba and Plano, the drum. The drum is the heartbeat. The drum is the center.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:The drum is what carries these stories through generations of people, through enslaved Africans who fought for resistance on the island. And so I think placekeeping, yes, is a tactic for gentrification about physical land, about neighborhoods, about land back potential movements in solidarity with Native folks. But it's also about these more ephemeral or non material opportunities to keep things like stories, right? To keep things like the messages we get through songs like Bomba and Plena, that they offer those ways for how people have resisted for generations. So I think it can be more expansive.
Kristie Soares:I love that. I think that's so key for populations, which is really every Latinx population that moves circularly, for whom place is a complicated concept and home, as Chicano feminists have long written about, is a complicated concept. So placekeeping, I think you're right. For people that are migrating either within their lifetimes or generationally back and forth, like placekeeping can be about culture keeping as well.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Yeah. And like, you know, when we're talking about gentrification, we're not just talking always about housing displacement. We're talking about cultural displacement, how people might still live there, but they're renters. They don't own property. They don't own land.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:They, however, have shaped that neighborhood with a particular culture. And that culture gets displaced oftentimes before the people can get displaced, right? We see that as in the arts, in particular, of who gets funded to do these public artworks.
Kristie Soares:Yeah. As is the case, I mean, in Puerto Rico, obviously, militarization, U. S. Militarization in Puerto Rico, gentrification is a form of destroying the ecological resources of Puerto Rico as a form of physically displacing people, but also a form of displacing the culture. And I'm thinking about Bad Bunny's recent residency and how he had to basically create that privately, meaning that he had to create, for example, the power infrastructure to be able to power the actual Coliseo so that they would have power so that the show could go on and people could sit there with lights on and air conditioning and all that stuff.
Kristie Soares:So in other words, he was creating not just the music, obviously, but the actual infrastructure that has been destroyed on the island because of U. S. Militarism. So there are these just complex ways that placekeeping overlaps with culture, I think, in your work.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Yeah. And I got to experience my blackouts for the first time once I was in Puerto Rico. It was so sweet. Just the way that it turned black and then everyone started cheering because they like, We picked a good restaurant with a generator when we were in Loiza. So it was very fantastic to see how people are building infrastructure.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:We have a lot to learn from people on the island. My next project's about climate justice and looking at Native women, two spirit, and women of color and gender expansive folks that are doing this climate work. And so I was able to interview some people while I was there and just seeing the use of solar is really remarkable and something that we definitely need to learn from because they've had to do it for survival. This is kind of a random question, but one thing I was wanting to talk to you all about a little bit was the actual craft of writing. I know that you all have published books, Karma, you've published several.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:You mentioned earlier you were working on a book in higher ed. Christie, you have your next book, your second book on disco. And I would just love to talk a little bit about the craft of writing because, you know, I think that we're very intentional scholars in terms of not only what we write about, but actually how we do that. And my students oftentimes are asking, you know, what are the ethics around being a writer? And I think that that's something that almost becomes a hidden curriculum or gets bunched into this scholar activist box, which I think does disservice to all the work that everyone's doing.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Karma, do you have any thoughts on terms of what's your writing process like? What are the ethics for you as a writer? Who are you accountable to in your writing?
Karma Chávez:Yeah, it's so funny. Yesterday, I was meeting with one of my students who's preparing for her comprehensive exams. And she didn't tell me what she wanted to talk about before the meeting other than it was exams. She walks in and she's got Chele's Methodology of the Oppressed. And I was like, Oh shit, I haven't read this book forever.
Karma Chávez:I was like So she sits down and she's like, so, you know, I picked this book up to be the next one that I'm reading. And she's like, and I picked something up that because I wanted to read something really pleasurable. And she's like, and then it took me like two hours to get through the introduction and it's 10 pages long. And she was like, I just, I don't understand the writing. I don't understand why it has to be this difficult.
Karma Chávez:And so then I spent like the next half hour probably pontificating about a certain politics of difficulty, particularly at the time that Shayla's writing that book and that there's a kind of legitimacy that one has to attain. And so the student was like, okay, that makes me feel a little better reading it. And I think for me, I mean, as someone, you know, probably the generation right before you all, then like a couple of generations after someone like Sundewall, I feel very lucky that that generation did the work of creating space by writing in that difficult way in order to get our fields a certain kind of legitimacy. And I don't feel the burden of legitimacy any longer. I feel that I can write with clarity, which I really try to do for a wide range of audiences and still be taken seriously as a scholar across an array of fields.
Karma Chávez:And so that's kind of my politics around writing is I really do try. It's not to say that I sometimes don't dig into the weeds a little bit of complex theoretical terms, but I'm always trying to imagine an audience that is not necessarily sitting in my classes, but maybe someone who I've organized with or someone whose intellectual material I might be analyzing in the book. Want them to be able to read it and not be like, what is this crap? And I think that's important, which though I'm also not opposed to difficult writing and I don't say that as a normative thing. But for me, that's a big part of my practice in politics around writing.
Karma Chávez:But I will also say just, you know, writing is a pain in the ass, right? Writing is hard. Cannot do any of the things that people say you're supposed to do about writing, like write every day or whatever. So I write in fits and spurts. I'll write like 20,000 words in one week and then I won't write again for three months.
Karma Chávez:And it's just like it's a horrible process. I throw temper tantrums and it's just, I think people should know that whatever comes out on the page that looks nice, it generally didn't come through an easy process. What about you, Kristi?
Kristie Soares:Yeah, it's funny. So Jessica and I are both students. We're both students of Chela Sandoval. And she was on my committee. I mean, I think Chela is maybe the most brilliant human being I've ever met.
Kristie Soares:I mean, her facility with theory is something else. So it's funny because when I read that book, when I have to revisit it, and I'm like, Okay, here we go. You you have to gear yourself up to get into Methodology of the Oppressed. And then when you get in, I'm like, this is Chella writing so this is like onenineteen of what she was thinking. You know, if you know her, if had her as an interlocutor.
Kristie Soares:So it's so interesting because I learned so much from her. I'm sure, Jessica, you did too. Because I learned, first of all, that thinking about really complex things is not the domain of white men, which hopefully is obvious to our students. But I don't think that that was really necessarily the case when I was in grad school. My degree is in comparative literature.
Kristie Soares:So it's a different positioning in as much as it's not politically oriented and also in as much as the kind of gods of comparative literature are white men writing really complicated things are like Derrida and Foucault and Duluth and Guattari and all these. So my training is in reading all those people. And Cello was the first person I met that was like, yeah, you understand it. What's your take on it? Just write it.
Kristie Soares:And giving me that permission for me was so freeing to have someone that was so smart read my work and be like, yeah, I do think Derrida was wrong on that. And being like, what? I'm allowed to say that? Who am I? And now I write on pop culture, which is a thing that everyone thinks that they understand and that they don't need explain to them.
Kristie Soares:So my sort of writing practice is to make clear that pop culture is doing really complicated work, as complicated as Foucault or anyone else, and to put those theoretical traditions in conversation with pop culture texts and pop culture creators. And it's a constant back and forth to where I'm also always writing for a non academic audience. And then I published my book. I sent it out to everyone I know and love. They were like, Nice.
Kristie Soares:I was like, Did you read it? They were like, I tried. I thought the photo on the cover was really nice. And it's not that people don't care. It's that it's so dense.
Kristie Soares:And to me, I was writing. And I'm often told that I write in a really accessible way. Bringing it back to Cello Sandoval, for what I'm trying to say, I'm writing in a really accessible way. And also, that's a kind of theorization about pop culture that we're not generally encouraged to do in our everyday lives. And so it is really for someone who's not used to this or training this unnecessarily dense and complicated.
Kristie Soares:So I would say that in my writing process, I've been really humbled by the fact that I actually pride myself on being a really clear writer and really writing for a non academic audience. And also sometimes we're saying really complicated things and there's a reason no one has said it before. And there's a reason that it's not immediately intelligible. So it's like this back and forth process for me of toggling between wanting the person who made the text to be able to understand and hopefully agree with my analysis and also not wanting to run away from saying, I have something to say and I think some of these white guys got it wrong.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Yeah. Oh, my God. I just have like had a Rolodex of chase stories through my head. One time we spent like three hours in a grad seminar just reading one page of Marx and we theorized and we drew diagrams. It was fantastic.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Another one of my professors had us read Grammatology and Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands together in one week, and we only talked about page 32 in Grammatology. And I'm like, why didn't you have us just read that page? But the exercises of grad school. You know, for me, when I think about writing, writing groups have been so critical. As I mentioned, Christy and I were in one.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:I have a couple at the U where we share work. And for me, that's been such a liberatory process because you see these final products, articles or books, they're fancy, they're beautifully written, and you don't see all the stages of how that got there. So I appreciate, Carmen, what you said, right? Like, I'm already 20,000 words and it's like stressful. And so in these writing groups, you know, I'm with full professors.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:I was a postdoc at the time and I'm like, Woah, a shitty draft is a shitty draft. Doesn't matter what stage you're at in the academy, you know, like, all right, cool. I got this. And I'm in another writing group with amazing scholars, Nick Estes, Dwight Lewis and Jessica Garcia Fritz, who is an architecture outside of my field. And I just really admire these peers of mine.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And again, they bring drafts and I'm like, Oh, well, all right. That's, you know, we're all humbled by starting. And I think that that's really liberatory because it allows the kind of mysticism of writing to fizzle away. And it has allowed me to be more flexible in the kind of writing I want to do. I also think I write in a way that is accessible to people outside of the academy.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:My mom is a great litmus test for that. She started reading my book. She said, Oh, I can't pick this for my book club. I don't think it's going to be a good book club book. She's been in a book club for like twenty five years with the same women.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:I said, No problem. Thank you so much for just like even considering it, you know? So yeah, I appreciate that, Christy. Like we try, but who knows how much we really are. I think the other thing for me about like the ethics of writing that I really hold true is to, and maybe this is the performance in artists in me that's like, Let's just improv our way through this thing.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:But I get questions from students like grad students, like, How do you set your research agenda? And for me, I really don't have a research agenda. I have a set of political values. And those political values mean that I'm in deep relationship with many different people in the community. And so I trust the process that the next writing projects will emerge based on my values and my relationships.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And so, for example, like I'm working on this piece about Ricardo Levens Morales, who is the father of Olivia Levens Holden, who's in my book. He's a Puerto Rican printmaker. He was part of a collective called Northland Poster Collective for thirty years in the Twin Cities, and they did international solidarity work a lot of times in the labor movement, but with all types of people. And I never thought I would write about him. I've known him for a decade.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And this thing just kind of emerged. And they're doing this oral history project. And they said, you know, we kind of need a scholar to help us think through what oral histories are, right, or how we do this. And so I started having conversations with them and from this emerged the opportunity to write. And I think that that's like a very different orientation to the academy when you're not like seeking out the next thing, but that what you're writing about is truly coming from, you know, some people might call it the heart or your set of political values.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And I see that, you know, Carmen and Kristi, you all do this countless in your work. You know, Kristi, I'm thinking about how you got into your new book on DJing and Karma, you're writing about higher ed right now. Like, I couldn't think of a better leader to be a chair for a department that's fighting their way through this atrocity that we have right now.
Karma Chávez:That's nice of you to say. One thing I wanted to say about what you were talking about when I was evaluating your tenure promotion case as an external reviewer. I love this quality of your work that it's so organic, but I described it in the letter as that you're very data driven. What I meant by that, of course, is that you don't bring preconceived ideas or even preconceived questions to the work. It's like you kind of immerse yourself.
Karma Chávez:And then from there, the theorization comes. I think that's work at its best, but it's not always understood. What do mean by that? I guess people don't always think of work in that way as like social scientific scholarship, for example. But it really is, that's the work at its best and your work just does that really, really well.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Thanks. I appreciate that. You know, like, I think that's the hard thing in getting a Ph. D. In an quote unquote interdisciplinary, although I would argue we are a single discipline, Chicano and Chicano studies.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:But my advisor, either Herradado was and still is an amazing social psychologist. And so social science methodology is very important. And I think sometimes people who don't understand our field in Chicanx, Latinx studies, I had a colleague say like, oh, you just cherry pick good quotes and stories. And I'm like, actually, no, there's a very rigorous method, that goes along with all of this work and it takes time and it's complicated because humans are complicated. I would love if people would fit into these nice little boxes, right?
Jessica Lopez Lyman:But that's not the way it works. People are really messy and contradictory, and you got to figure that out.
Kristie Soares:I just want to give a shout out, Jessica, to your research process because you were asking about writing. But before we can even start writing, we have to start the research. And I was friends with you and colleagues with you when you did, what, ten years of oral histories? How many years were you in the field? Yeah, as obviously an observer, but also a participant in the art space.
Kristie Soares:And I think people maybe don't realize how hard that is because that's ten years of not just labor and hours, but also ten years of maintaining relationships of the complicated. I mean, it's movement work of the complicated sort of interpersonal politics of figuring out what's going on, how to be ethical, how to position yourself. That's really hard work. And I think it's one thing that I want to sort of highlight because you know, that one of your colleagues said that we cherry pick quotes makes me so mad. Because really what it is, is a really intense process of going through hundreds of pages of notes of transcripts of because you're a performance artist as well.
Kristie Soares:And because you do performance methodologies of also doing a kind of auto ethnography where you're reflecting on your own participation in the process and how your own presence has affected what people say and don't say to you. And so it's actually, it's sort of the work of three different disciplines in some ways put together three different methodologies put together in order to come up with this perfect quote from a poem that explains something that you saw repeated across a 100 oral histories, you know? So I just wanted to kind of highlight that.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Thanks. I appreciate that. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you all are eager to talk about before we end our time?
Karma Chávez:I mean, there's so much we could talk about with your work. We can go on and on forever, but I feel like what our conversation has demonstrated so far is the richness of the work and the kinds of conversations that it brings up that go in so many directions. To me that that's really scholarship at its best when it's not just about the particular topic, but like it's so generative in that way. And so I guess, yeah, we could go on and on, but I think this has also been a really robust conversation.
Kristie Soares:Yeah. Thanks for your work, Jess. Thanks for inviting us here to talk about it.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:Yeah, I really appreciate you all taking the time. I feel like we are constantly in a moment where it's just one fire after the next. So I appreciate you all taking time out of your life to be here and in this conversation. I truly am grateful for all of the work that you do on your campuses and your communities. I really view you as role models for the kind of work that I want to do.
Jessica Lopez Lyman:And when I think about who I am as a Chicana feminist scholar, I really wholeheartedly believe I'm accountable to people like yourselves. I'm just very appreciative that we were able to have this conversation about the book Placekeepers.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Placekeepers: LatinaLatinx Art, Performance and Organizing in the Twin Cities by Jessica Lopez Lyman is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.