Stories from Summer Vacation: Irene Garza on the (Incredible!) AMS Graduate Student Library

This story comes to us from Ph.D. student Irene Garza, who has worked with fellow grad student Brendan Gaughen to create the (incredible!) AMS library:

You could say my summer activities began several months ago when H.B. 2281, an Arizona law prohibiting Mexican American and ethnic studies programs in the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) went into effect in January. In February, I helped to organize and participate in a national Read-In Day held at the University of Tejas campus, in solidarity with the No History is Illegal Campaign protesting 2281. Nationwide, students, teachers, community members, bookstore owners, freedom of speech advocates and so on, read aloud from the books banned from TUSD in accordance with 2281.  A significant number of UT-American Studies faculty and students participated, including Prof. Nhi Lieu who read aloud from Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror, Prof. Cary Cordova who recited from Jose Antonio Burciaga’s Drink Cultura, Prof. Naomi Paik who shared passages from political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s memoir, Live From Death Row and doctoral candidate Jaqueline Smith who gave a fierce performance of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Across the UT campus, students and faculty donated books to the Librotraficante Movement—a Houston based initiative to symbolically smuggle banned books back into Arizona to create “underground community libraries.”

Hearing my mentors and colleagues read from these texts, many of which have shaped their scholarship and pedagogical practices, inspired me to continue an informal project which I began last summer—the creation of an American Studies graduate student library. The idea of a student library grew from my desire to broaden the currents of intellectual exchange between graduate students about their diverse fields of interest. Currently, there are graduate students doing work on co-ops, mercenary violence, transnational adoption, the American prison system, Israeli “pinkwashing”, the national park system, urban gentrification, comic books, and the history of yoga (to name a few). As I felt on the day of the Read-In, the texts we share with each other, including our favorite “AMS Go-To” books, widen our perspectives, challenge us to think more critically about how our personal research interests intersect with others, and offer interesting points of conversation that can sharpen our insights about the field itself.

Of course, the library also has its practical uses, since most of the books will no doubt be accessed for coursework, Orals preparation, and as teaching resources for AI’s. Currently, the library is up to 250 books and is arranged both chronologically and thematically. Alongside canonical texts like Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land and Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden, are more contemporary AMS classics such as  Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Jose Esteban Munoz’s Disidentifications, Ned Blackhawk’s Violence Over the Land, and Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts. Since its inception, the AMS library project has been a collaborative one with Brendan Gaughen who took the lead on collecting and organizing the books and with the various graduate students who have donated from their personal collections.  Books, be they “contraband” or not, play a powerful role in my life, whether for activism or leisure. My hope is that the AMS library, much like the Librotraficante libraries, will motivate, challenge, and maybe even light some fires. The summer’s ending soon, so go get your reading on.

Undergrad Research: A Trip to the Archives in NYC, Part 2

Note: this is the second of two installments about David's archival research trip. The first can be found here.I landed at La Guardia, took a taxi to the apartment building on W 71^st street, unloaded my bags, and finally sat down in New York City, contemplating everything I would see over the next few days. The Berg Collection wouldn’t open until Tuesday—it was Saturday when I flew in—so I had two full days of sight-seeing available to me and I took advantage of it. I visited Times Square, the Empire State Building, Liberty Island, Ellis Island, NYU campus and Washington Square Park, Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Station, the site of the World Trade center, The Strand, and up, down, and around Central Park on a tour-bus. By mid-week, I was used to catching the subway and disembarking near Bryant Park, a brief walk away from the ice skating rink and, most importantly, the Stephen A. Schwarzmann building, the iconic section of the New York Public Library. After two full days of exploring Manhattan from top to bottom, I was ready to begin the research that brought me to New York in the first place.There is always a difference between what we expect to happen and what actually happens. I expected the Berg reading room to be an unsettlingly quiet room, observed by predatory librarians making sure that the timid, silent researchers at the tables didn’t destroy the priceless artifacts in their hands. But in reality, the room’s acoustics reminded me of the sixth floor of the PCL where occasional conversations and the jostle of books and pencils on the desks aren’t followed by an agitated, “Shh!” It was also staffed with helpful, caring, and most importantly, smiling, librarians ready to assist me however they could.The Kerouac archives are, at first glance, daunting: they consist of 90 boxes of materials, as well as several oversized materials. The sports materials—real and fantastical—reside in 4 of those boxes. I figured I could finish a box a day, even having enough time to eat lunch and take an extended trip around Manhattan. What I didn’t expect was that I’d only make it through box 59—the first box that contains Kerouac’s sports diaries of 1936 and 1938, as well as his horse-racing newspapers and personal baseball statistics and analyses of his Pawtucketville teams—after two and a half days of work. When I started to read his sports diaries I became absorbed in his day-to-day accounts of sports events across the nation, including the wins and losses of baseball teams and horse races, as well as his detailed predictions for future events. He was dedicated to reporting the outcome of every game or race he encountered.Boxes 60-62, which contain the fantasy baseball materials, weren’t as time-consuming as 59. I had plenty of time to examine the contents, including fantasy baseball newspapers, cards, statistics, letters, and diagrams for how to play the game. If you can imagine a 14 to 16-year-old Kerouac, sitting in his bedroom, developing his own sports newspapers and stories, some in pencil and others on a typewriter, you also have to imagine a much older Kerouac—in college, on the road, and eventually bloated and worn-down by excessive drinking in the early 60s—keeping a systematic record of his fantasy baseball league, teams, and players, some with fleshed-out backstories.Whatever I thought sports meant to Kerouac before this trip was an underestimation. He lived and breathed sports. Before he ever had dreams of becoming a novelist, Kerouac had dreams of becoming a star athlete and a journalist. What appears to be an amusing anecdote about a football scholarship to Columbia University becomes the realization of a young Kerouac wanting to excel on the field and become a sensation. Before becoming part of the nomadic Beat gang of writers and artists in the 1940s and 1950s, Kerouac was part of the Lowell gang in the 1930s, playing baseball, running track behind the textile mills, jotting down the statistics of his friends’ batting averages, hits, and runs in a steno notebook.It was thrilling to sit there amongst all of these materials and realize that I loved every minute of it. While looking at his sports diaries, I had to remind myself a few times that this was it. I wasn’t reading about these diaries; I was reading these diaries.My subway ride back to the apartment gave me time to think about the future and what all of this meant to me beyond the thesis. Not only had I collected materials that would enrich my thesis, I had also gotten a brief taste of scholarly research. I wanted even more meals in the future.The future still looks cloudy to me past the month of May when I graduate. I still don’t know which graduate school I will attend, or if I will be attending graduate school at all. My future has never felt so uncertain. But knowing how accomplished I felt after returning home to Austin after this trip, and knowing how much fun I had working with these primary sources and one-of-a-kind artifacts, I know that I can do this for the rest of my life without regret. I learned that I love research, and I believe research is quite fond of me, too.

Undergrad Research: A Trip to the Archives in NYC

Note: this is the first of two installments about David's archival research trip. The second will be published tomorrow.This January I was fortunate enough to take a trip to New York City and conduct research at the New York Public Library for my honors thesis, “Making the Team: The Real and Fantastical Sporting Life of Jack Kerouac.”Before the trip was even conceivable, though, I was in the midst of applying to graduate schools for the fall 2012 term. Graduate school has been an aspiration of mine since high school, and now, nearly five years later, I was finally applying and taking my first steps into a new tier of my academic career.It was hard to convey to other people how terrified I felt in approaching such a critical moment in my life. As I completed each application, I grew anxious about submitting them. This was the first time that I was really taking a stand for myself and my future. Graduate school was part of the plan, but that plan was never set in stone. It was only what I had imagined for myself thus far. For the first time, I started to imagine different paths for my future that didn’t involve graduate school.This isn’t a great mindset to have if you want your applications to express confidence, but these were the thoughts that ran through my head. As each application was submitted—four in total—it was as if my confidence in my plan was being cut short by every click of the “Submit Now” button. By the end, I was quite drained.Returning to my thesis research, last semester I came across a short book written by Isaac Gewirtz, the curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, titled, Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats. The book was a basic introduction to Jack Kerouac’s fantasy sports materials housed in the Berg archives, which detailed Kerouac’s obsessive interest in creating horse-racing newssheets as an adolescent and maintaining his own fantasy baseball game for most of his life. I had only read about these interests briefly in his biographies and a few of his novels, but I had no idea how extensive they were in reality. The book spurred my hope to go to New York City and see Kerouac’s fantasy sports materials in person.With the assistance of a generous COLA Honors financial award, I made plans to stay a week in Manhattan in mid-January and comb through the Berg Collection. It was to be my first taste of hands-on archival research. I was excited and anxious weeks before the trip, quite similar to my feelings when I submitted my graduate school applications. I would pore over the Kerouac finding aid on the Berg website, examining every box’s contents, reading every description, and thinking endlessly about how each item could support my thesis.When the day finally came to fly out of Houston’s Hobby Airport, I wasn’t only worried about my thesis; I was worried about my future. If I can’t make it a few days in this archive, come back with the necessary information, survive a new city, how am I going to cut it in graduate school? I was mentally attacking myself and preparing myself for failure. I told myself, “You’re not going for fun, you’re going for work.” I imagined I had to be rigid and stern in my demeanor, firmly dedicated to being a “scholar,” or what my conception of a scholar was supposed to be. Never have I had the impression, of course, that the American Studies faculty here at UT are unemotional, stone-faced academics. Quite the contrary, they are some of the most engaging, talkative, intelligent and cool—yes, cool—people that I’ve ever encountered. So, how I came to believe that a scholar should be a stern stick-in-the-mud is beyond me, but that’s what I felt I had to be to make it through this experience.It wasn’t until my plane descended into New York in the early evening—when I caught my first glimpse of the thousands of yellow-orange lights sparkling in the dark across the expansive city, the Brooklyn Bridge gently arching across the quiet flow of the water below, and the Empire State Building merely the size of a snow-globe sized replica of itself—that I realized I was about to land in one of the biggest cultural metropolises in the country and the world. Whatever feelings I had about not having fun and being a righteous fuddy-duddy were gone. I was in NEW YORK CITY.