Anthropoetry, is a poetry which utilizes
the tools and techniques of the ethnographer
as a means of generating a poetry that is centrally
about the human condition.
Just as documentary poetics
is a research-based approach to poetry,
which relies heavily on the gathering of external
information, Anthropoesia hones in
on a field of study related to
a specific community or ethnic group.”
Tim Z. Hernandez [1],
author of “All They Will Call You”
The Huelga Schools movement was a direct response to the Houston Independent School District’s attempt to “integrate” public schools in the late 1960’s. In truth the plan didn’t actually go into effect until the 1970 – 71 academic year. The district’s goal – to integrate brown and black schools – included pairing up the schools and zoning brown students (whom were already labeled as white) to predominatly black schools and vice versa.
In some cases – the district didn’t provide students with adequate transportation to get to their new schools – which might be a mile or more away from their homes (in many cases, a predominately white school was closer than a paired brown or black school) and place them in schools where the district didn’t provide additional materials to teach the new populations now attending their new placements. The Mexican American community decided that enough was enough. On August 31, 1970, the Mexican American Education council founded over 8 schools where they would take the educating of their children into their own hands. The Houston Huelga Schools were born out of fire.
Community resistance shaped the ethos of the Houston Huelga Schools. These were “strike” schools that valued the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, also adding in education on classic labor strategies, community organizing, cultural history, including boycotts, picketing, sit-ins and peaceful protest. Further actions and efforts on the work to educate Mexican American students extended outside the classroom. The MAEC and school faculties included community education on local resources, family meetings and opportunities to address the HISD school board. The Huelga Schools were established mostly out of Houston’s Northside and East End. The schools themselves were a network of community settings: YMCAs, local churches, a dance hall, people’s houses, etc. Teachers and support staff at these “strike” schools or “freedom schools” as they were also known as were made up of volunteers, undergraduates in education programs from the University of Houston and Rice University, certified teachers, retired teachers, parents, grandparents, hell, even a former post master general quit his job to become principal for a huelga school because he believed in the work.
The major historical facts, details and data are collected in an important book – “Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston” (2005, Texas A&M Press), written by Dr. Guadalupe San Miguel who is currently a History professor at the University of Houston.
I was able to speak to Dr. San Miguel in 2014. He gave me his blessing and let me know that this was still such a fresh history; many of the participants were still alive, but I needed to act in the moment to make it work. I’ve been working with his words in my ears ever since.
This work has become a series of questions. I dive into the anecdotal side of the Houston Huelga School history. What was life like for the people who made up the schools? What was a teaching day? What was school like for a kid back then? What did a lesson look like? What did the connections with the Black community in the fight for equality against a racist, white, male dominated school board look like? This is what this work has become and also a commentary: that communities of color have always been the heart of their own solutions.
***
The idea behind Anthropoesía is directly about switching hats and trades, allowing the creative writer who works in fiction/prose and poetry (that, let’s face it, are as true as the scientific world we live in) to pursue objective topics in order to create a creative element. Writers always function in cycles. Writers take wild turns in life. In one moment, they are in a creative writing phase, in another, an editing phase, and in yet another, a reading phase – so therefore, it is practical to say that there is a “research phase” that can help with a creative outcome. But the research here is not to pluck up a leaf of realism to add to a story that is fictitious, but rather an uncovering of some truth that can be framed and questioned through a creative lens.
There is no hypothetical, entirely imagined landscape. The product of this work is not “based on the truth” because the poet or the creative writer is using the truth of the data, the information to uncover more truth. It is a delicate process. It is a slow process if done correctly. It is more than rushing to get to what the bare truth is, because in this work, the writer is still dealing with, paying respect to, honoring, the fact that this truth is important to a people and a community. It is the poet who pays enough attention to say that something is important, even if a community hasn’t been given the proper chance to see the importance before.
A writer doesn’t just engage in reading or experiencing new facts and forms in order to “research”. This isn’t just the library study of a text or news clippings. A writer must take a break from the page and explore all facets of a topic, in the same way that a pathologist, a detective, a journalist or a historian take on a given subject. For some writers, it is the second skin they live in. Some writers can enter the world and work of Anthropoesia with great instincts. They relish learning new things about something that serves as a counter-history. There are creative forces that are to be made. There are fresh perspectives to be connected to that have never been thought of before. The writer then, must find those skills in themselves in order to uncover a truth. These truths are unique and though a topic is likely to be repetitive (as themes in the world are), the uniqueness comes from the flavor the writer gives them. That flare or flavor is entirely attached to the route the creative writer takes in order to discover it.
***
A few years ago, the City of Houston dedicated a Texas Historical Marker at the Leonel Castillo Center located on the Northside in honor of the Houston Huelga Schools. It was a brilliant moment. The center was a former elementary school – Lee Elementary that had shut down years ago. The building was taken over by Baker-Ripley, a local community organization that has always had ties to the Latinx community. The unveiling of the marker and the subsequent commemoration were sights to see. The Castillo Center, as I know it, had already been up and running for the last 5 years or so – Leonel Castillo is an Icon here in Houston. He worked for the City of Houston as its Comptroller and was the face of the Huelga School movement here. He was the lead organizer for the Mexican-American Education Council and the M.A.E.C. were the governing board for the Huelga Schools. He helped steer the movement, helped educate families about why the boycott was needed and helped organize the educational side of what the Huelga Schools did as promoted as far as curriculum.
I took notes that day – noting the people in attendance and with much respect, I tried to see if any of the former Huelga School teachers would be willing to be part of interviews I was setting up. I explained that I wanted to honor their work and their place in history by creating a collection of poems and prose. Most of the shied away. I must respect that. I must respect that they might not have trusted my intentions at the moment. And that is also a part of the Anthropoetic methodology – knowing what elements might be sacred and which elders to leave alone. So I ended the day taking a much quieter approach. I observed a moment of history play out. I listened to stories.
I was able to draw a connection or two that day. I was able to figure out that there were kids who wanted to be a part of the movement, but their parents were fearful of having their kids kicked out of school. I was able to talk to a huelga school teacher who was already teaching during the day and stealing materials from her school, making extra copies and taking books and using them to go teach at night. Hell, I even found out there were huelga schools that existed as evening schools. All of these nuances came to me, not as a result of just a pragmatic approach of investigation, but a willingness to be open to smaller conversations – the sidestepped charla and chisme. And this made all the difference – this too was the history of the Houston Huelga Schools.
A Note on Anthropoesia vs. Docupoetry (or Docu-poetics)
As you begin an exploration into Ethnographic writing and Anthropoesía, a note must be made about how Anthropoesia and Docupoetry are related but also different. Consider them to be primo-hermanos, related to one-another, but distinct.
The writer dives into the anecdotal. They don’t run from it. Scientific exploration and data numbers say anecdotal records cannot provide hard evidence, but I disagree. The anecdotal gives us the clearest picture, the context from which measurements are taken.
If I am doing the work right, I can write poems about how teachers got paid in bartered apples. I can tell you about fundraisers where the profits went to support the Huelga Schools. I can create found poems from some of the diary entries as created by the principal who kept journaling all 182 school days in the 1971-72 school year. I can tell you about a seedy dance hall that became a Huelga School. Where Dr. San Miguel can tell you the dates and the locations of where the Huelga Schools were, I can tell you the colors on the walls of the schools. This is a voice that needs to be heard and it is not just my voice telling it (entirely)
If Docupoetry is built by using language that exists in archives, oral histories and documents, then Anthropoesia is the next step. It is the investigative poetry built from the exploration of the document. It is an investigation connected to both the fact of the moment but also the anecdotal. The POEThnographer asks the questions and the answers that follow may be a tidbit of information that serves as either a glimpse into someone’s life or the life of a community – or it can be a straight addition to the counter-history of a person or a community. An example (in a nutshell) would be writing a docupoem based on a police report written about a robbery gone wrong at a convenience store on some dark night. The anthropoem would be written about walking around the area, a retrace of the police report in the store, noting what is in the moment and the echoes of that history.
But there is more.
***
The Writer as Anthropologist/Sociologist
It is the writer’s job to give a piece of writing much detail. The same can be said for the researcher. The poet ethnographer or the anthropologist poet must be willing to facilitate the lines and the connections between all the points of interest and find the one line of truth that exists in a subject. This writer must be able to create for themselves and for everyone following the work created, a methodology on how they establish their connections to the subject they are working on. They must create something and take note of how they are making discoveries as they write. This work is very “meta” upon meta, upon meta.
Just like a scientist or a journalist keeps notes on leads, ideas, hypotheses and drafts of initial experiments, so too must the “anthro-poet” in order keep up with their thinking about their movements within this work. In essence, the creative writer is formulating notes that can also be a form of creative writing. The writer must be metacognitive (thinking about their thinking) and also be thinking about how they are researching. I have no other words for it but to call it a creative “metasearch”.
Metasearch is the way one can illustrate/record/organize/analyze/communicate/resource/ utilize more than one “search engine” to understand and find information on a given topic – in truth, then, metasearch is keeping up with all the tools used to find the information needed (those in the virtual world and the real world). This can be a listing, a thinking map, a writing territory, a checklist, a foldable, scribbled notes, voice memos, etc., but something that shows, that keeps up with all the (interviews, web searches, oral histories, site visits, maps, lists, chronologies, archives, questions, etc.,) points of interest that lead the way through the topic the writer is focusing on.
I feel like someone will say: “your idea of the metasearch is indulgent and you just created a fancy name for keeping good notes.” But this is more than that bit of cynicism. This has to be purposeful. The poet, the creative writer, has to be able to not get lost in the creative draw of the work. This isn’t about the way one will create the publishable pieces, but more about how they are recording their way to it all. They must be able to pose questions, propose ideas, even draw lines in connections and have this all mapped out just for themselves to stay honest with the work.
This work is long term. This work is living and cannot be bothered with mere passion and obsession. This is a methodical scaffold, ever present and ever building. The poet here is creating more than what they bargained for. This work might start out as poetry, but if work wishes to change, it will. This poetry can live in multiple forms and extend itself. You might have been a poet when you started this work, but you come out a different writer.
Let’s suppose I am accessing an archive on say “local dance halls” in a city. I am lucky enough to have had a conversation with an archivist here in Houston who says that some photographer donated a collection of photos of all sorts of Mexican bars in Houston from the 60s- 80s. So creative writer me goes in and takes note about what I see, the make of the building, the marquis, maybe the light in the photo. I come away with a whole line of thought and a framework. I can develop this into a series of writings. I can walk away with an ekphrastic understanding of my topic with some sloppy notes and it could end there. But if I am working this as “anthro-poet”, I am willing to ask questions of exploration. I ask the questions about background: “Who donated this?” “What did it take to amass this collection of photos?” “Where did the name of each place come from?” “How far away are they from each other?” “What songs got played on the rocolas at each bar?”
Here, there are more questions to push through and the methodology of the responses is just as important as the methodology of how I am recording the process of acquiring the responses. All of this takes time and energy.
In anthropoesia, even the process is as creative as the result. “Good notes” is the non-negotiable element. The creative writer loses a thread in their work if they come at this without a course of action. Note: even when you plan big, you always get lost in the vast elements and leads of the work. The bottom line is the poet needs to always be prepared.
Make no mistake. The creative writer who begins this journey is working with a tiny framework and what feels like a massive amount of information, and sometimes the reverse is true. In some cases, the creative writer is engaging in a little known fact that their work with it might be the only review of information out in the world.
This is why there is such a heavy request that the writer be objective with the work. There is no romanticizing the truth. The creative writer already lives with the idea that the narrative or the poem “writes itself”. In the same way, the creative writer engaging in Anthropoesia must also step back and uncover whatever truth there is to be told.
***
The Houston Huelga Schools Movement ended by 1974. Mexican American families and the Mexican – American Education Council were able to go to the courts and have HISD’s unconstitutional methodology for desegregating schools thrown out. The district would have to adopt a truly equitable method to integrate classrooms. The schools were shut down. Only one or two still functioned past the initial three years.
The impact to the Houston Latinx community and to the city was epic. Current and former politicians, activists and educators were born from the Houston Huelga School Movement. Individuals like Carol Alvarado, Ben Reyes, Johnny Mata, Dr. Agustina Reyes and Dr. Patricia Flores, all of whom have shaped Houston have ties to the Houston Huelga Schools. Houston’s format for magnet schools was born from the “fall out” of integration. The District had to create a way to entice white families to attend schools with children of color, so they created schools that focused on highlighted content. Thus, you ended up with the High School for Law Enforcement, the High School for Performance and Visual Arts and the High School for Health Professions, all schools that still exist today.
Even I figured out a connection to schools.
Leonel Castillo – the head of the M.A.E.C? Yeah, he went to my high school. He was Vice – President of the Student Body and ran track.
As I was digging around and looking into his background at the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, I ran into an article that mentioned he went to a private catholic high school in Galveston, TX. There is only one. He graduated in 1955 from my high school. Back then, it was Kirwin High. It eventually was changed to O’Connell High School. I ran back home to check the halls.
Our graduating classes are small, and traditionally, the school posts up these whole frames with oval photos of all the kids with their names written in calligraphy. The Student Council officers for that year are posted at the top above the “CLASS OF ______.” In high school I remember staring at all the frames, wondering what happened to all those graduates and when my time came and saw our frame go up at the of the 1995 school year, I was proud to have my name and photo up there to.
So I go running back to the school and explain what I am looking for and the front office lady says to just look around the hall until I find it. I walk around the hall and run into it – the frame from the CLASS OF 1955 and who do I see? A young Leonel Castillo.
I go looking for mine too. And it dawns on me. I was also Vice President of the Student Body and I ran track. This man I shared a space over time. We walked around the halls of the same high school, probably faced the same racist comments over the years and just like that, the Houston Huelga Schools aren’t just an objective thing anymore. It is a legacy I know oh so well.
[1] Hernandez, Tim Z.. Syllabus for Anthropoesia. Department of English, University of Texas, El Paso Fall 2014.
Image Credits: Catalina Olavarria Follow
