PostNormal Times: Making History Public
PostNormal Times is a podcast for our complex reality and unpredictable world—a world where the stakes are high and innovation is crucial. Andrew Vosko, PhD, associate provost and director of transdisciplinary studies at CGU, and his guests explore ideas that transcend traditional academic boundaries and address our most pressing needs. Get ready to challenge your assumptions.
In season 2, episode 4 of PostNormal Times, Andrew Vosko and guest Romeo Guzmán, assistant professor of history at Claremont Graduate University, discuss the ins and outs of his work in public history, including his work with the South El Monte Arts Posse (SEMAP) and leadership of the Casa Zamora community center.
Season 2 Episode 4 Transcript
ANDREW: Welcome to PostNormal Times, a podcast for our complex reality and unpredictable world, where the stakes are high and innovation is crucial. In this series, I get to sit down with some of my favorite minds to explore new ideas that transcend traditional academic boundaries and address our most pressing needs. I’m Andrew Vosko, associate provost and director of transdisciplinary studies at Claremont Graduate University. Welcome to the show.
I’d like to welcome everybody once again to PostNormal Times, where we don’t discuss business as usual, we discuss business and everything plus the kitchen sink about how we’re working in a rapidly changing time. I’m very excited to introduce our guest today, Professor Romeo Guzmán, who is an assistant professor of history at Claremont Graduate University. Welcome to the show.
ROMEO: Thank you for having me.
ANDREW: And Romeo: How long have you been at Claremont?
ROMEO: I just finished my fourth year.
ANDREW: But you aren’t a stranger to the area. You were really local. You went to Garey High School?
ROMEO: Yes. So, I was born in Goleta, which is actually where the Mexicans in Santa Barbara live.
ANDREW: I didn’t know that.
ROMEO: Yes. And then we moved here. My mom was from South El Monte. Her family got there in the 1960s. So, we had connections to that place.
ANDREW: I didn’t introduce the rest of you: You’re a public historian who has focused his work on place and sense of place. I wanted to ask how you ended up going on a journey, academically, from the kid who went to Garey High School to ultimately finding your way back to your backyard at The Claremont Colleges with this particular focus. I think it’s an interesting transdisciplinary focus. I want to get into it a little bit, too. You live that … you’re a scholar of things that are particularly relevant to who you are.
ROMEO: There’s two different ways I can tell the story. Both ways are accurate and also inaccurate. I guess I’ll start with the one that’s more dramatic, which is that I went to UCLA as an undergrad. Then I went to California State University, Northridge for my MA and then to Columbia University in New York City. I went to Columbia knowing that I wanted to do Latin American history. I knew I wanted to study with someone from Mexico or who had deep ties to Mexico. At Columbia, there were a lot of professors … the person I ended up working with was Pablo Piccato, who was actually … I learned later that his father was exiled from Argentina, so he grew up in Mexico. But for me, it was important, this idea of being able to speak with folks and having a notion of authenticity. I wanted to study the place with somebody from there, who had lived there in a different kind of way.
So, I went to Columbia to be a professor of Latin America, of modern Mexico, and to write these transnational histories. The public history stuff was really an accident. What I mean by that is that there was no oral exam I did, no classes I took, and no faculty I worked with doing that kind of work. They had deep engagements with journalism and things like that, but they didn’t have a public history practice.
That’s the first part of the narrative: There was nothing in my past that had connected me to it. There was a deep commitment to thinking about the archive and also thinking about the people in the archive and their oral histories. There was also this Latin American lefty tradition about being engaged with the public. There was an idea of the public intellectual as existing in the world.
So, those things were definitely there. But in terms of what a practice looked like, and how that happened, materialized, and became a theoretical foundation or premise, whatever it might be—that really was an accident. The way that turned out was …
Let’s see, how do I tell this part of the story? I was at Columbia. I had a friend I’d met at UCLA. She was the editor of a newspaper magazine called La Jente. We’d been friends for a long time. Eventually, we started dating. And then we founded this arts collective called the South El Monte Arts Posse (SEMAP). For a long time, it was really not connected to history. We were doing things like taking over vacant lots and doing art projects. We were doing parties at a park for a book, things like that. So, it wasn’t clear that I was using my historical background in this arts collective.
I didn’t hide it from the faculty, but it wasn’t something I was emailing people about. I wasn’t like, “Oh, I’m going to be doing this.” It was sort of this big side project.
Then eventually, the more it evolved, the more we started doing historical work and thinking about not just how to tell the history of this place, but how to do it in a different way. How were we going to build a relationship with the community? That necessitated thinking about the archive and knowledge differently. That really started in 2012. Our first event for the arts collective was two weeks after our child was born. So, both SEMAP and our kid are the same age, more or less. She’s going to be 13 in the summer. So, we’ve been doing this for about 13 years.
ANDREW: SEMAP is the South El Monte Arts Posse. Okay, cool. And you also have a background in art history as well, right?
ROMEO: Yeah, that’s true. So, then this is where there’s this narrative that’s completely disconnected. There’s these like little nuggets or seeds. I was an art historian at UCLA. I was really attracted to visual culture and the power of art, and to thinking about it as a source and as a space in which to read stuff.
And for whatever reason, when I was an undergrad, semiotics was still cool. People were really into that.
ANDREW: It’s still cool. I think it’s awesome!
ROMEO: Yeah! That stuff really stuck with me. It was new, but it was already a decade old, the cultural studies, cultural history, and the ways in which people were thinking about culture as a text that can be read. I spent time during my MA program at the Smithsonian. They have a Smithsonian Latino Studies fellowship. So there’s all these little things that were somehow connected to SEMAP, even if there wasn’t a direct route. It was art history as undergrad and then doing museum work at the Smithsonian.
When I was at Northridge, I needed a job like everyone needed a job. I ended up working in the history department as the admin. I also worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art giving tours to sixth and seventh graders, of the permanent collections. So in that sense, there’s always this little thread that you can follow through art and culture being there in different ways.
ANDREW: I’m of the belief that there’s a teleological end to everything we do, but, at the same time, there also isn’t one. People always ask “Well, what does that have to do with what you’re doing now,” assuming if you had planned every step out to a few steps after it, it’d get you to this current place in time. That’s never how it works. But at the same time, I believe that if you actually put yourself into something, it never goes away, it becomes a part of you and it comes back up in different parts of your life. So, the people I invite to have these conversations, there’s something about them that’s very transdisciplinary, that makes them hold a lot of different disciplinary spaces. They’ve transcended their traditional space and disciplinary boundaries, which I think you’ve also done. … They’ve changed and in the process, they’ve been transformed. I think that it’s really neat the way you’re telling the story of not just your personal life—which I want to come back to—but also of this arts piece that’s in there, and the visuals and the semiotics as they relate to somebody who’s also interested in history, and how you’ve turned all these things into a career. You’ve really pieced them together. One of the things that you said that I’m going to come back to, though, is that it’s not like you hid all this from your faculty advisors through time, but you probably didn’t advertise it either, did you?
ROMEO: …This was one of those things where it’s both true and not true in the sense that once we started writing the book, or working on the book—
ANDREW: And what was the book?
ROMEO: The book’s called—this was important in 2012, El Monte turned 100 … pioneers, white wagons, we don’t like that. We started writing against that. And eventually, we built an archive. As we were building an archive, we sent material to people and were like, “This sounds like something you might be into, can you write an essay about this?” A lot of folks were writing for us. We were grad students. We didn’t have any rep. We didn’t have any books. We didn’t have any credit or anything like that, any sort of big institutional support–just our friends from Columbia. In that sense, there was a whole crew of grad students who got really down and really passionate about the project. They even visited once a month and wrote about it and published a chapter in our book. There was a lot of support in that way.
But it wasn’t something that was part of my comprehensive exams, dissertation, or coursework. We did get a small grant at some point from the department to do some of this work. So, it very much was not additional work because it didn’t quite count. It was separate work. So, when we defended the dissertation, my advisor to his credit said, “Hey, we want to start by acknowledging all the work they’ve done in El Monte. We’re not going to talk about that today, but we do want to acknowledge that we think it’s really important. Congrats on that work.” And then we defended the dissertation.
That’s just the way it was, at that time at Columbia. Pablo Piccato and Caterina Pizzigoni, who was on the faculty there as well, were really good about building cohorts that had folks from Mexico, Latin America, and Chile, with first-gen Latinx folks and also traditional white American students interested in Latin America. So, there was this really neat space in which we were looking at and thinking about each other. How did we all get to this place where we’re studying Latin America or Mexico?
ANDREW: You mentioned that there was a Mexican tradition in history, in public history, that you brought into some of what you were doing early on as well. Did you come across this by accident or were you looking to see if this was something that had been … a colonial version of history or a colonized version of a historical curriculum? What happened when you decolonized that? Or was this something that people knew about? Did you uncover that? …
ROMEO: I guess a couple of things are important. Carlos Monsiváis was this prominent writer of popular culture and he wrote for a pretty big audience. So, when he died, they had his casket at Palacio de Bellas Artes, which is in the center of Mexico. I was there with one of my friends who was from Sinaloa and had been living in Mexico for a long time. We’re in line and we’re waiting just to walk by the closed casket. At that time, we were grad students, and the folks who were there were from all walks of life. There were folks who’d been reading him for a really long time, and professors, journalists, and all the “nice” society were there as well.
I think in Mexico, there is this tradition of popular writing for a broad audience. The folks I was friends with and some of my advisors at Columbia were really committed to writing in the popular press and engaging with the public in those ways. So, when I would go from Columbia to Mexico City for summers for research, I would stay with Froylan Enciso and Guillermo Osorno. At the time, they were a couple. Guillermo was the editor of Gatopardo, which is kind of like The New Yorker for Latin America.
Froylan had always been a force in his own way, in different ways. He had been a writer for a long time, he’d worked with The Los Angeles Times, showing journalists around and getting them acquainted with Mexico City. And he was a grad student at Stony Brook University, which is how we connected. But the point is that I was hanging out with these Mexican academics who were studying in the U.S. with their partners or their friends in Mexico City. They were all deeply engaged with the public somehow, whether it was through journalism or editing.
So, there was also that desire to think about the ways in which Mexican intellectuals model this public-facing public engagement approach to life.
ANDREW: How does this compare with your experience with the engagement in U.S. intellectual circles or expanding beyond those intellectual circles? If we had a similar funeral here, do you think we would see the same kind of casket visitation? Do you think there’d be the same outreach?
ROMEO: That’s a great question. I’m trying to think about parallels. The spaces are just so different. The Mexico City libraries and bookstores are … I’m sure they’re disappearing in some ways. They’re not like … it’s hard to know. There’s been this argument that bookstores are leaving. But they’re coming back. They’re always coming back and they’re always leaving. But I don’t know if the competition in Mexico … I don’t think that there is this fear of books disappearing. I’m hesitant to make any claims that Mexicans read more.
ANDREW: You’re being very careful. And I’m pushing you a little bit. I’ll tell you my impression from … you talking about it. We have a version of the public intellectual here. … You’re helping me perceive that in Mexico, it’s different. But I don’t know if that’s really true or if that’s my own bias.
When I think of public intellectuals here, there are folks who see the importance of not being seen as the expert on everything, who want people to know what they know well, and to be translators for that kind of knowledge and to engage with the kinds of action it should bring. But … the danger for public intellectuals here is that the ones who are most criticized and who give everyone a bad rap are the ones who talk about everything as if that’s their area of expertise because they’ve been given this kind of avatar-like deity status to represent knowledge itself. So, if you have this famous person or podcaster–notice I said famous person so that people don’t assume that I’m a public intellectual! Let’s disqualify you or me from this.
But there are people who talk as if they know everything, and they’re still running on X/Twitter, or on Instagram. There are these very popular folks who have the most popular classes at whatever university, telling you X, Y, and Z about the truth. It’s questionable if they know it. There might have been something they read in Popular Science or in a book once, but they’re not academically rigorous about being a public intellectual. They’re coming at it from whatever angle. So, is there that difference? Or am I jumping the gun there? …
ROMEO: Maybe we can say it’s gotten complicated with the rise of social media, the ways in which X/Twitter and celebrity academics work. That’s made it easier to have a cynical view toward the ways in which that mentality has been solidified and how resources get allocated toward it.
The important thing for me is that there’s this deep inclination to be part of the world outside. Beyond being the expert … I think of my friend, Guillermo. He has a show on channel 22, where he interviews filmmakers, novelists, and curators and it goes on YouTube every week. So, I forget about it and then I binge it when I’m cooking. … But it just seems like the likelihood of there being … a popular channel that has a TV show dedicated to interviews with culture, and they’re these deeply engaged, serious conversations. It’s not Democracy Now!, right? It’s something …
ANDREW: …more journalistic.
ROMEO: I saw in my friend and the community that I belong to in Mexico City, a deep engagement with the world. It’s something that really stuck with me.
ANDREW: That’s what it sounds like. That’s what I was feeling or sensing in your conversation. Now, you said something else that I want to go back to, when you were talking about the history of El Monte being from the pioneer perspective, and then you created another history based on oral histories. Are these accounts of people who were local and writing about the personal family stories that they knew? How did you organize a group of people in a rather informal way to get everybody’s versions of the history of El Monte from different perspectives than the one being promoted in … a formal way?
ROMEO: So a couple of caveats are important. We knew that the history was wrong because the scholarship had disavowed that kind of history. This old white great-man history and the scholarship that was privileging and organizing histories around the nation-state are exclusionary and they erase and obliterate all these other things. So, there were these larger theoretical texts that gave us the language to talk about and to really explore why the temporal framing of this was completely inaccurate. The history from the east to the west was outdated. There’s actually history from the south to the north as well, plus this more global history from the Pacific, and there’s all these different ways to think about the history of California and of a particular place in it.
So, there was a whole set of theoretical texts and tools that were not even that new, 10-20 years old, to help us think about why this particular narrative was wrong. There were also these really beautiful works by folks like Mike Garcia, about the stadium, Deborah Weber on the WORD strike, and some of the stuff on the barrios. So, there were these interesting moments at which we knew these things had happened. There’s one thing that happened, there’s this other thing that happened, and it’s like “How is it that all these things are happening 20-40 years apart from each other?” And yet we still think about this place as only being about this white pioneer narrative.
So, there were these early texts that I think gave us a lot of, not just hope, but also theoretical anchors to think, “Okay, what else is there?” What we ended up doing was knowing that these things existed because people were thinking about and writing about them. We had this really open approach to doing oral histories, scanning materials that we were finding, and building an archive piecemeal, that then would take us to narratives and stories that we didn’t know about.
In some instances, we were learning about them as we were going through the material. One of our premises for the project was “El Monte matters.” The more we did the work, the more we realized not just how right we were but also how much more this mattered than we had originally thought.
ANDREW: Can you explain to me what public history actually is? What defines public history as opposed to history?
ROMEO: OK, here I’ll pick some fights.
ANDREW: I can’t wait. With me or with people not in the room today?
ROMEO: With everybody.
So look, I tell my grad students this all the time, that I’m not committed to saying what is not public history. So, if you want to say that public history is writing a column, that’s fine. If you want to say that public history is chairing one exhibit, that’s fine. If you want to say that public history is giving a tour, that’s fine. All those things are fine. All those things are valid as public history because they’re using some sort of skill set to engage the public. I think that’s it at its most basic. …
But as professors and as grad students, we have to have an actual theory of our practice. In other words, we have to be much more rigorous in saying, “I did this thing, this is public history.” I think we must have a clear ethical and theoretical understanding of what it is we’re doing, how we do it, and why we do it. For me, that’s part of the three things I talk about all the time, that we’re building reciprocity between community members and academics, and that means shared resources and shared power going to creating projects together and allowing them to merge and exist in different ways.
The first thing for me is reciprocity. The second thing is that everything we do has to have multiple homes. In other words, if we’re collecting primary sources and sharing and building knowledge, all those things have to exist in multiple ways, be read by multiple people, and ultimately experienced by a wide group. And at its best, it should be enjoyable. It should feel organically connected to the thing that you’re studying or thinking about.
…And point number three is we’re really committed to thinking about changing the physical landscape. How does the archive, how does the stuff we’re learning, help us change the physical landscape? And because we’re an arts collective, all three of these things have to be transdisciplinary. And this isn’t…
This is never about one person. All our projects, even if you just pick one thing that we’ve done, are ultimately collective. They all exceed any one skill set. … So, it’s not new, but we did a mural, the first or second year that I was here, and that mural was painted by like 14-15 people, it was designed by … artists from Mexico from Mexicali and Guadalajara who had come up and worked with us for a long time. The content of the mural was very much based on research that we had done years ago, including some lost, hidden, erased, and whitewashed murals. The mural itself was the product of this collective labor that went back years.
ANDREW: Right. So, I also wanted to bring back some transdisciplinary theories in what you said because I’d never heard this definition of public history. I’m really glad you explained it, first of all, and there’s a lot of transdisciplinary components to it. The first was what you mentioned about the way that we would describe it in the transdisciplinary space, as doing research …that comes out of anthropological practices that echoed out into lots of fields. When you’re coming from a place of being the other and you decide to use something that affects people, or to make the people themselves the subject matter, but you’re not including the affected people … in the question-asking, you’re only including them as the object of study—
So, you’re not developing the questions with the community you’re working with. You’re researching and you’re developing the questions for the people you’re working alongside and the research has different voices involved. You have co-researchers, who aren’t the people you’re actually looking at and doing research on.
That changes the paradigm of the ivory tower versus everywhere else. In that way … it sounds like public history approaches that in a lot of ways by being like, “Look, I’m not looking at you under a microscope, we’re both figuring this out” as we’re asking the questions. Is that right?
ROMEO: I think most people are, if they’re being honest, doing a little bit of both. In other words, you’re still writing the dissertation and you’re still writing the book. There’s an extent to which the committee members aren‘t actually co-editing the thing. You’re the author. So, there’s a little bit of that. But I do think there’s an inclination and push towards the latter.
But what I think really shifts us a little bit–this is a problem with a lot of the public history scholarship that comes out–is this premise that the public historian is not of or from the community. So, I think that does shift the way we talk about this stuff. Like, what does it mean for the people building the project to be from there? My mom’s from there, my wife’s from there. I grew up in my grandma’s house a lot. It isn’t like we’re sort of swooping in. So, I guess from the beginning, it already shifts a little bit because it’s like we’re from there. We’re not arriving there. But one of the challenges in public history … there’s some great new texts and when they talk about academics or focus on the relationship to community, they all kind of assume that you’re not from there or of the community.
So, even in some of the sort of theorizing, which is about shared goals, this research still assumes this out-group. But I think we’re at our best in terms of collectivity when there’s a smooth transition from folks who were “recipients” of something that they came to an event to learn about from us, or they were the audience members or volunteers—they’re going from that to becoming active members having a hand in and directing what we’re doing. So, there is flexibility and openness in having folks participate in some way and then become part of the crew and actively shape the direction of the collective.
One good example is when we were painting the mural at the Valley Mall. We had a couple of volunteers. And then when we were opening up this house in El Monte, we reached out to them right away and were like, “Do you want to be a resident at the house?” And now they’re part of the crew. So, there’s a lot of instances like that where folks who we did an oral history with or folks who we had worked with in these different capacities went from being collaborators who’d helped us with something to then actively being part of the crew and … directing and shaping what we were doing.
ANDREW: I think that speaks to another … this came from a general theory of planning … it’s the wicked problems text that’s slipping my mind right now. … This doesn’t have to be a wicked problem per se but the researcher isn’t absolved of a connection with the research. Once the paper is written, when you’re done with the project, you’re not actually done with it. If you’ve gotten involved with it, you’re still involved with it now. You don’t just get to say like, “Thank you, I’m done, and now moving on to the next thing to get me a grant or the next publication.”
If I’m working on some community-oriented thing, like we’re trying to increase the literacy in an area or we’re trying to help with housing, we don’t write a singleton paper working with the community and then we’re done. Now we’re invested. You have to realize as a researcher that that’s part of the ethic of what you’re doing for certain kinds of things that you’re researching. Is that something that is unspoken in the public history trends?
ROMEO: I think so. … In a lot of texts, there’s a commitment to place and to communities, beyond the semester or the academic calendar.
ANDREW: That’s our version of time, but it’s not everybody else’s version! Another thing you said that was really interesting was that you have to think about the audience. Who’s reading this? Who is this for? We’ve talked about it before on this podcast, the concept of standing on the shoulders of giants or finding a gap in the literature and that’s why you’re doing what you’re doing. … But then there’s also like, “Well, what if there’s a need to study something? What if the entire giant structure, which you created and which you’re standing on the shoulders of, missed a lot of perspectives and a lot of voices that had been ignored and is going to continue to miss them because you’re still trying to stand on the giant rather than all the little people who have been ignored for so long?”
So, are you realizing that your research doesn’t have to just be standing on the shoulders of giants, that you can cross over between the giants and other people who haven’t been included as a part of that giant?
ROMEO: I think what we’re trying to do—and I don’t know if we’re gonna succeed—is we’ve already sort of rewritten the history of this place. That’s done. In high schools, kids are reading about it, college kids are reading about it, and there are all these people who’ve read it and said, “Hey, read your book, I want to work with you.” And then they end up being part of the posse. …
I think the loftier goal is building an ecosystem of activists, academics, cultural workers, and community members committed to whatever might be. How do we sustainably create a community? How do we support the next generation of writers and artists? That’s really what the house is about, right? That’s what the house is trying to do. … If we do everything right, then all these other things will happen. In other words … there will be more scholarships, more of this, and more of that. That can be difficult because it’s not always clear how that happens, when that happens, or even if that’s happening.
ANDREW: What approach are you using? Is your output for this loftier goal an ecosystem to create …? That’s not a small thing to ask of anybody. … Certainly in biomimicry, you can understand ecosystems from an ecology point of view. There are different versions of ecosystems, but what’s your method for wanting to do this or going about it?
ROMEO: What’s our method? … We have a house. It’s in a park. It’s called Casa Zamora.
ANDREW: And there’s going to be an open house, right?
ROMEO: June 8, there’s a really big party, an open house, a block party celebrating one year of being there. There’s a couple of core things to the house: There’s a lending library and an archive room. Those are the two established things. Everything else is basically things generated by the group.
The other really important thing is that we don’t have volunteers. We have what we call residents. So, we have activists, educators, artists, a librarian, and a gardener in residence. So, in total, there’s about 10 of us who are part of the crew, and everyone except for me and someone else is from El Monte or has a connection to El Monte. So, we’re all from the area.
For us, one way in which we’ve committed to thinking about that ecosystem or what it means to be in a house is that it has to be heavy with locals. It has to be heavy with non-CGU folks. In other words, instead of having it be an outpost of CGU faculty and staff and students, it’s inverted. The residents, the folks who are doing the work, are from El Monte. CGU contributes in different ways, but it must be heavier on that resident end as opposed to us having students tutoring classes or something like that.
So, then the shape of the house and the direction that the house takes isn’t being dictated by myself or by CGU students, or by a dean or by a provost … but it moves and shifts based on what folks in the house want to see and the ideas that they want to see emerge.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have a role or that the core of SEMAP ideas is not there, not at all. But it does mean that the questions we operate from are “What do you need to be successful? What can we help you with? What do you want? What projects do you want to do? Do you want to launch?” That’s the starting point, as opposed to saying, “These are the goals, help us get to this.” We don’t dictate to the residents what they should be working on.
ANDREW: If you had an unlimited amount of resources that weren’t money … to apply to Casa Zamora for its sustainable success, what do you think you would do to that house to see it become more successful next year, and then the year after, and in continuity?
ROMEO: The biggest obstacle right now is time. In other words, my time is very limited. My wife’s time is very limited, and everyone in the house, their time is very limited. So, one of the problems or challenges to think about with this ecosystem instability is that—and this is not like a new problem for SEMAP, this is an old problem—we’re an arts collective, we’re not a nonprofit, we’re not a for-profit, and we never have had a big budget. So, that creates a degree of autonomy and experimentation on the ground, of responding to and doing the things we want to do.
But what that means oftentimes is that folks who participate or who are part of the collective, or who are helping, are on a trajectory that is not going to end with them staying with us. They’re going to go somewhere else. So, one of the tragedies of the collective—which is a tragedy of teaching, too—is that you have these moments and you have these great years when you have these great cohorts and you have three or four students, but you’re gonna stay there as faculty while they’re gonna go on and do bigger and better things. This is part of their journey.
One of the challenges with SEMAP is that that’s the model we operate on, of having these great people who are part of our world and once they finish school, once their jobs start consuming them, the more that they’re gonna pivot into this other world of stardom, and then they will no longer be accessible to us or they just may not have time for it. So that’s a reality we’re comfortable with. But it doesn’t make it less tragic.
ANDREW: You’re about to come into this because you’re going to be teaching a transdisciplinary course in the fall. So you’re gonna have students from lots of different spaces and that’s part of the fun of it. Chances are there’ll be somebody from public health, chances are you might get an economist in there, you’re gonna get someone from business. You should get a pretty interesting spread, if you’re getting a semester’s worth of commitment, certainly at that level. But if they were to leave their echoes on the posse, what kinds of echoes do you hope that they leave?
ROMEO: That’s another really good question.
ANDREW: I’m not going to make it easy for you: I like to ask these!
ROMEO: Yeah, look, right now we have $500 to do like a little soccer workshop. So, we’re thinking about what’s the best way to spend that $500. It could be something that we can reproduce without much labor time. And we’re still thinking through that. Our community librarian is the one who got the money. His name is Pedro Gonzalez, and he’s the one who’s going to design the project. But what I would like is to build a curriculum, buy materials, and reproduce that week-long camp in the fall, the spring, and the winter.
So, I think going back to the class, there’s like two, well … let me talk about the class because I think that it’ll make more sense. We have a budget. It’s a nice budget.
ANDREW: For T-Courses.
ROMEO: Yeah, it’s a really nice budget. So, we have a budget. And it’s going to be spent and allocated and used in ways that the students determine. Students are going to learn these three different approaches to thinking about public engagement. And then they’re going to come up with a project, they’re going to execute the project, of course, and engage in dialogue and engagement with the community, the archive, the past, and with history. What I would like is for those projects that engage the community to be fun and exciting, and for students to learn something from them and create a model through which we can do it all again.
I can give one example, so it doesn’t feel so abstract. I had a student who was not in a T-Course–this is why it didn’t have a bigger footprint–but in one where students proposed projects. They wrote a grant. One of the students proposed a house cookbook, which would be built off interviews with folks from the house as well as the community. It’d be a cookbook of things that people ate at the park when they were kids, that are easy to make and don’t require a stove. The idea was that we could easily say like, “Okay, today’s Friday, we need snacks, okay, let’s go buy this, this, this, and this. It’s $12. We can feed a kid with this. Here’s the cookbook.” So, this student had pitched the cookbook.
If she would have been in your class, she would have made the cookbook. And then we would’ve created a budget for like five Fridays, and we would’ve executed those recipes. And then now we know that with $100, we can feed X amount of kids with a couple of recipes, and then that stays at the house. Whichever projects we do, if we’re able to replicate or do them on a smaller scale, that’s really great. For me, that would mark success.
ANDREW: It’s interesting because I’m thinking … the first question that pops into my head is, “How is public history involved in this process?” To me, it sounds like public history is the vehicle for community-building. Public history isn’t the end unto itself, there’s something bigger that comes out of it. Is that the approach that you generally take or is that specific to this particular project in the posse?
ROMEO: When I was at Fresno State University, I had a really great time there because I was taking that approach. In other words, I was only there four years, but it feels like I was there a lot longer. By the time I left, it was really easy to call on folks and be like, “We’re gonna do this.” It was really easy to call on folks who were activists, community members, professors, alumni, current former students, or whoever they might be, so we could very easily do stuff.
We did something at the house, actually. We had a little soccer tournament, and we combined it with a conference on Palestine. We were doing almost a teach-in of sorts. The Fresno crew came down, they donated soccer balls, they donated our … they made the shirts and all this other stuff. So public history, it’s about the process for sure. But you know, if you don’t have people, you don’t have public history.
Any good public history project … what I like about public history is that we’re building community. Those committee members whom we’re shaping, there’s enough space for them to become much more involved, and to become part of the crew, if they want to be and if that’s something that manifests itself.
ANDREW: I think there’s something really compelling about the product being in an ecosystem that you’re strengthening, enabling, and building capacity in. Those are all really interesting approaches that differ from traditional views of scholarship in any area. Certainly, scholarship in history, in the humanities, or in any field is not a common output.
So that prompts the question: How do you convince other historians that this is something that’s doable and worthwhile? How’s the community grown since you started doing this? It’s hard to build the plane while you’re flying it. There’s a lot of things that are not the passive approach to being a historian, where you’re inheriting all the tools and repeating what you did back to someone to say, “This is stewarding the discipline in the way that it should be stewarded.”
You’re transgressing it in some ways, but I don’t know if you’re fighting for your space. So, I guess that would be the first question: Are you fighting for your space to do this?… Where do you find that people are listening to you the most about this work? And in what ways are you making a compelling argument?
ROMEO: There are a couple of caveats that I think are important. One is that SEMAP is a collective of folks. My wife is a fiction writer and a journalist, plus she’s a CalArtian, which for some folks will mean a lot of things.
ANDREW: CalArtian?
ROMEO: She went to CalArts.
ANDREW: You sound like a Martian when you say that.
ROMEO: In their writing program, they don’t have tracks. They’re very experimental. That’s their thing. It’s like … I have a role in this. And I talk about it and articulate it, but SEMAP is a collective. That’s the first part and I have a role in that for sure.
My advice to grad students—and this is the way I like to think about how I engage the discipline—is to finish a dissertation, to do single-authored monographs because that’s what our discipline understands and sees. And then if you happen to be at a place that has a union, then I think you have a better shot of having your superiors understand what it is that you’re doing because there’s a contract there.
But I think I think there’s a real tension, around what public historians do, what the American Historical Association says it values, when it says it values public history, and then what that looks like when you take it to your specific campus or university.
So, I actually think it’s not fun. It’s a really difficult place to be in. I think a lot of folks who do public history feel really torn between having this really deep personal satisfaction, this intellectual satisfaction with doing public history work, and then asking explicitly, “How does this count?” and running into a wall of silence. So, I think there is a real problem with institutions and disciplines around this sort of lip service. We value inclusivity, transdisciplinarity, and social change, and yet when it’s in front of you they don’t know how to count that.
ANDREW: The counting is maybe one of the most difficult things for any transdisciplinary venture because it doesn’t fit the single-author monograph kind of accounting. It doesn’t fit the tradition of the discipline that knows that you’re doing this. If you look at the original folks of the transdisciplinary movements in this country, they’re very, very senior in their fields. So, they had nothing to lose anymore, they didn’t have any cares to give about what their colleagues thought of them. So, it’s like they were seeing the limitations of these other things and were like “I’m going to start doing some of these other kinds of work.”
But what’s interesting in this era is how we’re seeing a lot more scholars like you coming out who are also embracing this idea of like, “I can’t not do this other kind of work because that’s why I’m doing the work in the first place. It’s just as important for my personal mission.” So, you establish your time as an expert in the traditions, and you become a steward of the discipline. From that, you don’t have the 20 years of runway that maybe someone else had to establish themselves as a full professor, but you do establish yourself. And you can, as you said—the advice you give to graduate students is very common—display your fluency in a traditional version of that discipline. And you also challenge the discipline as well, by pushing its boundaries a little bit, and you transgress them in some nice ways.
Some places are a little bit more amenable to hearing that than others. And the truth is, I think, while you might not see it from the inside, it is causing a change. It is being listened to. It is, I think, the trend in not just history, but the humanities are really moving in this direction, too. There’s a lot of opportunity there.
But at the same time, it’s still a version of pioneering. You’re not in the wagon, but what you are doing is really having to, on the wagon, … clear some space, and there are going to be people in the next generation of this who will have an easier time because of the work you’re doing now.
ROMEO: Yeah, I think one of the challenges with reading is that folks who don’t do this work don’t understand how labor-intensive it is. … I think some places think of this as a service. This is a service that you’re doing. You’re doing, not quite charity work, but like community service, as opposed to deeply intellectual scholarship.
I think that’s a misreading of it. There’s just a lack of actual familiarity with doing it. …
ANDREW: I think things always come back to the count. There is a commodification of what you’re doing as any kind of intellectual or scholar. Traditionally, the commodification came in the form of a monograph or an article, and now you’re creating a different kind of currency and saying, “Well, this is also something that can be commodified.” But we don’t take that point.
ROMEO: The problem is that, you know, if you show up with Monopoly money to Seven-11, they’re not gonna sell you a Slurpee.
ANDREW: Yeah, it is hard.
ROMEO: It can be difficult to know whether your currency is Monopoly money, or whether your currency is $1, or the euro, or whatever.
ANDREW: But at the same time…
ROMEO: I know what it is. But I’m saying … when you’re at a table …
ANDREW: But there are versions of this deck. I mean, cryptocurrency wasn’t a thing 20 years ago, and then cryptocurrency was how people both gained and lost fortunes.
So, there are great experiments in this that you see … having a major effect on the economy of higher ed. But these efforts can also be a lot more of a struggle. They really do get driven by passion rather than recognition, I would argue, because I’m the optimist thinking they’re making waves. I think that this is the trend. If you go one step above the promotion and the tenure committee, and you look at where people want to fund universities, where the public is looking toward university leadership, this is the stuff that most often comes up.
And so, I don’t think people outside the university are as interested in monographs and articles, even though they’re important, too. People are looking for those boundaries to be pushed a little bit.
ROMEO: Yeah, and listen, I value … I’m at a grad school, so I value deeply researched, deeply engaged reading and writing. So that’s not anything I want to stop. I don’t think anyone who does public history is advocating for the loss of funding or support or fewer monographs or articles, but I think we’re just saying that we can have more things on the table. We can try to do all those things, if possible.
ANDREW: I have one more question for you. I’m curious: If you were to create an ecosystem that had sustainability built in, that had the capacity to thrive, and to make some kind of community-oriented organization, what would it be in Pomona and what would it do? And would you involve Claremont somehow?
ROMEO: This is a really difficult question. I’ve been in South El Monte, doing work there for a really long time, and I started when I was in grad school. We’ve been going to Mexico City, New York, and Fresno, and we’ve remained committed to that work. I built it with Carribean Fragoza who’s from there who sort of never really left California except for short stints. I’ve been gone from Pomona for such a long time–not gone, I mean, I go to things and I’m here, but I haven’t been deeply engaged for such a long time that I wouldn’t want to build anything. I’d probably want to arrive at something where I could offer my assistance. There are a lot of really exciting things going on already. So, I’d want to contribute that way, as opposed to trying to build something.
I think that Café Con Libros is a cool spot. They’re trying to figure out how to do knowledge production, consciousness, community work—they’re doing a lot of really dope stuff. And Gente Organizada, I think they’re really neat, not just in Pomona, but regionally, the stuff that they’re doing—they have a chef program where they have a community member make the staff dinner, and then they’re trying to build people power, which is the way they describe their work. …
The dog? WORD? has been there a long time and they keep on pushing. So I just want to engage, see what might emerge, and learn how it could be useful.
ANDREW: I think that if we are going to see cool public humanities happening, then this Southern California region, some of which you’ve focused on, from the San Gabriel Valley all the way out to Pomona and then the Inland Empire working our way into the desert—I think that area is such fertile ground for so many cool projects. There should be lots of statues built in the next 20 or 30 years. …
ROMEO: Or not, right? There’s this sort of anti-statue movement?
ANDREW: Maybe not a statue, maybe a community garden together. … Romeo, thank you so much for the conversation today. It’s been great to talk to you as always. I learned a lot and I appreciate your candor and your honesty about everything. It’s been great.
ROMEO: Definitely, thank you.
ANDREW: Thanks for listening to this episode of PostNormal Times. Thanks to our guests, and thanks to our support from Claremont Graduate University. If you enjoyed boundary-crossing with us and want to hear more, make sure you follow us, spread the word, and tune in to our next episode.