Humanities on the High Plains

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dr. Joel Zapata to discuss his essay "The South-by-Southwest Borderlands' Chicana/o Uprising: the Brown Berets, Black and Brown Alliances, and the Fight against Police Brutality in West Texas." The piece emerged out of Zapata's involvement with the groundbreaking Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project and appears in Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas, published in 2021 by the University of Texas Press. The interview covers a range of topics, including: the social contradictions of the Jim Crow and Juan Crow systems in West Texas (as exemplified by the public cemetery in Lubbock); the role of police brutality in sparking the Chicana/o movement in Lubbock, Odessa, and Midland; the 1971 "March of Faith" and the 1978 beating death of Larry Ortega Lozano, both crucial turning points in the history of this movement; how these events helped lead to collaborations between Black and Brown social-justice organizations in the region; and the police brutality experienced by members of the white working-class in Amarillo in the 1970s. Zapata also discusses his other research in Mexican-American history, including his digital history project, "Chicana/o Activism in the Southern Plains through Time and Space," which maps the events described in the article and outlines the role of student organizers at places like Texas Tech in Lubbock and West Texas State (now West Texas A&M) in Canyon.

On this episode, Ryan is joined by Mark. A. Lause, Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati and author of The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West (Verso, 2017). Taking its title from a major strike led by ranch hands in the Texas Panhandle in 1883, the book traces the broader history of post-Civil War labor radicalism and third-party insurgency in the American West. Lause discusses this under-explored history and touches on topics like the criminalization of "mavericking" (the branding of unbranded calves, a way for cowboys to start their own herds); the ideological function of violence in the Old West; the idea of turning Fredrick Jackson Turner "on his head"; and the continued relevance of rural and Western populism in imagining alternatives to the two-party political system in the U.S. Lause also introduces us to colorful historical figures like "Broncho John" Sullivan, an American cowboy radical enough to impress Eleanor Marx Aveling (Karl's daughter) when they met at a Wild West show in 1886. For more on Broncho John, "a different kind of Western hero," see also Lause's profile at LAWCHA, the blog of the Labor and Working-Class History Association.

Ryan sits down with two of his WT colleagues, Dr. Amy Von Lintel, Professor of Art History, and Dr. Bonnie Roos, Professor of English, who join him to discuss their new book, Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West, forthcoming in February 2022 from Texas A&M University Press. The book seeks to "recenter" Abstract Expressionism by examining how this NYC-based movement flourished in the Texas Panhandle in the 1960s and '70s, as Amarillo art dealer Dord Fitz helped create a network of patrons and students for Elaine de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, and Jeanne Reynal (whose 1974 mosaic portrait of Nevelson is the image accompanying this episode). The book also explores how the work of these artists was shaped by their time in the "Middle American West"; considers the role of gender performance in defining and re-defining Ab Ex; and makes the case for why Reynal's mosaics and Nevelson's wall sculptures should be considered part of this painting-centric movement. The interview touches on what being a part of this artistic community meant for queer and Black artists in this deeply conservative region, and it ends with a consideration of Fitz's legacy here in the Panhandle. (Who, if anyone, is the modern-day Dord Fitz?) For more information on "The Women: Tops in Art," the 1960 show that helped create the art scene explored in this book, see Von Lintel and Roos's article in the Fall/Winter 2021 edition of Woman's Art Journal, available for order here.

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dr. Eugenio Di Stefano, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Di Stefano is the author of The Vanishing Frame: Latin American Culture and Theory in the Postdictatorial Era, published in 2018 by the University of Texas Press. The Vanishing Frame shows that as Latin American culture has become increasingly influenced by the politics of the human-rights movement, contemporary writers, visual artists, and critics have sought to "eliminate the division between art and life…so that the pain of the victim [of dictatorial violence and torture] can somehow become that of the reader or the spectator." Rather than promoting freedom or justice, however, this "vanishing" of the artistic frame is – the book contends – compatible with the logic of neoliberalism, and therefore complicit with a system that intensifies economic inequality, injustice, and un-freedom. To identify alternatives to this free-market consensus, the book points to recent works by figures like Fernando Botero and Roberto Bolaño, works that insist on the autonomy of the work of art, and therefore on the importance of the artist's intention, meaning, and political ideology rather on than the experience of the audience. Here Di Stefano unpacks these provocative claims, as well as describing the genesis of his latest collaborative project, the online Latin American cultural journal FORMA.

How can educators cultivate self-cultivation in their students? How can they maintain an intimate connection between their scholarly research, what they teach, and how they teach? How can they encourage students to find common ground in a period of intense political division? In this episode, Ryan discusses these and other challenges with Dr. Laura J. Mueller, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at West Texas A&M University. Mueller's provocative answer to these questions is "Modern Socratic Dialogue," a pedagogical approach she explores in her recently published article, "Modern Socratic Dialogue and Resilient Democracy: Creating the Clearing for an American Bildung." In this conversation, Mueller describes the historical roots of MSD and provides a step-by-step explanation of how to implement this method in the classroom, drawing on examples from her own courses. She also unpacks her argument that — because American identity is distinctive — we need a distinctly Americanized version of German Bildung. As the conversation turns to contemporary political questions, Mueller describes how her commitment to consensus-oriented teaching methods has been informed, in part, by her experience growing up in a rural and conservative part of Southern Illinois. She also explains the ways in which similar methods have been used in settings like the Highlander Folk School Workshops, the social-justice leadership school (pictured in the image accompanying this episode) that helped train civil-rights leaders like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 2019, after a nearly 40-year absence, affiliated minor-league baseball returned to Amarillo with the debut of the Sod Poodles, a Class AA Padres affiliate who won the Texas League title and drew over 400,000 fans in their first season of play. (This despite a team name that infuriated many locals — reportedly it's obscure pioneer slang for "prairie dogs.") As Brian M. Ingrassia suggests, however, the Sod Poodles are likely to face some of the same challenges that faced the city's first affiliated team, the Gold Sox, whose history serves as "a case study illustrating how minor-league ball often only tenuously thrived in a mid-sized city." An associate professor of history at West Texas A&M University, Ingrassia tells this tale in "The Yellow City's Tenuous Hold on the Gold Sox: Affiliated Texas League Baseball in Amarillo, 1959–1982," forthcoming in the Panhandle-Plains Historical Review. He joins Ryan on this episode to discuss the complex interplay between postwar urban development and minor-league baseball, as well as to share stories about the legendary players who have passed through Amarillo on their way to the majors. The interview also touches on the relationship between Ingrassia's first book, The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education's Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (2012); his more recent research on baseball; and his current scholarly project, a book-length examination of auto racing, urban planning, and the "good roads" movement of the early 1900s.

For this episode, Ryan is joined by Justin A. Joyce, Research Director for President Dwight McBride at the New School in New York City, Managing Editor of the James Baldwin Review, and the author of Gunsligning Justice: The American Culture of Gun Violence in Westerns and the Law. The paperback edition of the book, originally published in 2018, is now available from Manchester University Press. Gunslinging Justice argues that Westerns work together with legal discourse to legitimate certain forms of gun violence, establishing norms for who is allowed to engage in this violence - and why - and thereby helping to construct Anglo masculinity. In telling this story, Joyce traces the evolution of American self-defense doctrine and the history of the U.S. Supreme Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment. He shows how this evolution is also visible in the evolution of the Western as a literary and film genre, and he explores how the distinctive "firearm iconography" associated with the rifle, the pistol, and the machine gun works in classics like High Noon, Winchester '73, Rio Bravo, The Wild Bunch, and many more. In its final few chapters, Gunslinging Justice brings this story into the present, tracing connections between more recent film and TV Westerns - including Unforgiven, Justified, and Django Unchained - and contemporary social developments like neoliberalism and the effort to rethink the concept of "self-defense" in cases of domestic violence.

In this episode, Ryan is joined by four of his WT colleagues: Dr. Alex Hunt, Dr. Tim Bowman, Dr. Ashley Pinkham, and Dr. Christopher Macaulay. Together we discuss Sarah Smarsh's bestselling 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. Smarsh was born in 1980 and grew up poor in southern Kansas, the daughter of generations of wheat farmers on one side and generations of teenage mothers on the other. Her memoir, a National Book Award finalist, reads as a corrective to the mystification of the struggles of the rural working-class in America. It is also a rhetorically complex work of literature, written as a letter to the unconceived daughter Smarsh promises herself she will never deliver into a life of poverty. The episode begins with a discussion of the panelists' initial reactions, both critical and celebratory, followed by a more focused discussion in which they draw on their unique perspectives as scholars of literary studies, history, developmental psychology, and political science. Over the course of the conversation, we talk about a range of issues, from where the book fits into the tradition of Great Plains literature, to what it says about rural America's ambivalent relationship with the two-party political system, to how we might imagine using this book in a college classroom in the Texas Panhandle.

Ryan's guests for this episode are Heather J. Allen, Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Mississippi, and Andrew R. Reynolds, Professor of Spanish at West Texas A&M University. Allen and Reynolds are co-editors of the collection Latin American Textualities: History, Materiality, and Digital Media, published in December 2018 by the University of Arizona Press. The collection provides a venue for scholars working in the emerging field of "textual studies," with essays on cultural artifacts ranging from grammar manuals and newspaper articles to (as the editors put it) "items we might consider newcomers or even interlopers in the textual world," including phonographs, "costume books," postcards, publishing catalogs, and virtual databases. In the collection and in the interview, Allen and Reynolds make the case for what a Latin American perspective can bring to this (still Anglo-centric) field; discuss how textual studies can open up new ways of thinking about colonization, modernization, and globalization; and describe the pedagogical possibilities and challenges created by the digitization of archival texts.

In this episode, Ryan speaks with Christopher R. Martin, Professor of Communication Studies and Digital Journalism at the University of Northern Iowa. Martin is the author of No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Cornell University Press /ILR Press), named one of Choice magazine's Outstanding Academic Titles of 2019. No Longer Newsworthy traces the decline of the "labor beat" in local and national newspapers, as — beginning in the 1960s — these publications became less concerned with serving mass audiences and more concerned with targeting upscale consumers. As Martin shows in vivid detail, this shift in focus has distorted the mainstream media's coverage of labor issues and prompted many rural and working-class readers to turn to other, more conservative sources of news. The book provides a useful framework for thinking about the decline of the newspaper industry, including here in the Texas Panhandle, and it points to ways that publications can revitalize their labor coverage so as to better fulfill the democratic function of an independent press. For more information and video links for news stories, useful for teaching, visit Martin's No Longer Newsworthy website. For an application to the labor-journalism workshop described in the interview, visit the CUNY Graduate School for Journalism's "Reporting the U.S. Workplace" page.