ASU professor honored for leadership in Arizona Hispanic community
Rafael Martínez (left), an assistant professor of Southwest Borderlands in Arizona State University’s College of Integrative Sciences and Arts, poses with other recipients of the Los D-Backs Lideres Under 40 Award, which recognizes young leaders who positively impact the Arizona Hispanic community. Photo courtesy of Arizona Diamondbacks
Rafael Martínez, an assistant professor of Southwest Borderlands in Arizona State University’s College of Integrative Sciences and Arts, was recently awarded the Los D-Backs Lideres Under 40 Award, which recognizes young leaders who positively impact the Arizona Hispanic community.
The award, presented by the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Los D-backs Hispanic Council, is a reflection of Martinez’s 2023 project, “Querencia: Voices from Chandler’s Latinx Barrios," in which Martinez began collecting oral histories of Latino community members across the city of Chandler’s historical barrios and contemporary immigrant neighborhoods.
Martínez and Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, an associate professor of English and an associate dean of student success in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts, have also launched the Latinx Oral History Lab initiative, which aims to amplify Latino voices across the Valley.
In addition, Martínez’s first book, “Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States,” will be published in early October.
ASU News talked to Martínez about the award, the oral history lab and his book.
Note: The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Question: Congratulations on the award. What did it mean to you?
Answer: First of all, it means a lot to be recognized by an organization that represents or embodies the state of Arizona. But, also, a sport like baseball has always been important to the Latino community. Given the fact I work closely with the Latino community and baseball has always been a part of Arizona history, it was really significant.
Q: Let’s talk about your "Querencia" project. What is its purpose?
A: I wanted to be able to teach the history of the Southwest and the history of Arizona through a local project. As a historian, I’m trained in oral history. So, for me, it made sense to rely on that methodology to be able to start a project in the East Valley.
The idea was basically to showcase that the Latino community has been a foundation of Arizona and certainly in East Valley communities and to show through oral history across generations the contributions the Latino community has had. I live in Chandler, so it made sense to start there. We have a great partnership with the Chandler Museum, which archives and digitizes the materials that we’re collecting.
Q: You’ve interviewed 40 people thus far. How do you find the people you want to talk to?
A: It’s really important to think of some of the key stakeholders in the community that people look up to. You need buy-in from those folks to open the doors to the rest of the community to be able to have access to interviews. It’s much easier when a local community leader opens or makes those introductions than it is for any individual to come into a community and say, “Hey, I would like to interview you for this project” that they may not be familiar with. So, the approach was to build a network, attend community events, talk to community leaders and build the trust you need to interview people, especially when those interviews are a lot of times about their private life.
Q: What are the interviews about?
A: The questions are framed around the idea of querencia. It’s a common Spanish word that means love to place. It’s terminology that’s been developed by Latino and Hispanic Southwest authors. Mexican Americans and people of Spanish descent have been in this region for multiple generations. The idea of connection to place is embodied in this concept of querencia. So, the questions really revolve around talking about growing up in the city of Chandler. What did the city look like at that time? What did their neighborhood look like? What’s their love or their querencia to their neighborhood? And one of the questions I ask across the board is to name a local historical event that impacted the Latino community in the city of Chandler.
Q: You’ve also started the Latinx Oral History Lab initiative. What is the purpose of the initiative?
A: The Latinx Oral History Lab aims to tell the stories of the local Latinx/Hispanic communities in the East Valley leveraging its position at the ASU Polytechnic campus, while engaging with regional southwest histories and national narratives. The lab is a collaborative effort that stitches together the past and present to inspire a more inclusive future. The lab will work to train students across ASU to learn traditional qualitative methods and innovative techniques and technologies towards multifaceted forms of storytelling.
Q: Your book is due to be released soon. What is it about?
A: In a nutshell, it’s basically about how undocumented youth became the new phase of the broader immigrant rights movement and how through the different strategies they use in organizing have changed the way that we talk about immigrant rights in the United States. If you go back 30 years, the immigrant rights movement was a labor movement. Youth were certainly not the face of it. It wasn’t until (after the year 2000) where undocumented youth began to have access to higher education through different state initiatives that they began questioning the previous leadership of the immigrant rights movement.
Q: How has their involvement changed the movement?
A: They said we want to go from indirect forms of activism to basically now perform civil disobedience and direct forms of activism that use our body to disrupt the way immigrant rights are seen in this country.
For example, they took their activism inside detention centers, infiltrating some of these centers to bring news about some of the human rights violations that were happening in these spaces. The book is called "Illegalized" because the idea is that undocumented youth flipped the script. Oftentimes the mainstream media or society labels undocumented immigrants as illegal or not being able to be in the country because of their lack of documentation. The irony of it is that undocumented youth showed the ways in which the state criminalizes or illegalizes undocumented populations in the United States through different forms of repression.
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