Samaria Moss – The Digital Past Course Blog

Blog Post #9: Mexican American Folk Music Representation in Northern California

I chose to focus on the Library of Congress collection, California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties. I was shocked to see how many folks songs were available in the collection from so many different countries including Russia, Hungary, Finland, and Italy. I decided to hone in on Mexican American folk music because I wanted to create an expanded discussion on Mexican immigration to the United States, this time relating to the music. My historical question morphed into considering how Mexican American folk music in Mexican cultural settings on American soil is represented in the 1930s and 40s.

Sidney Robertson Cowell, a folk music collector in Northern California, partnered with the University of California, Berkeley and what is now the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center, to comprise “35 hours worth of folk music recorded in 12 languages representing numerous ethnic groups and 185 musicians” from Northern California. ¹ This collection of recordings is a continuation of the themes we’ve talked about in class, such as the recording of narratives from those who were once enslaved, accounts from migrant workers, and southern music being documented by the Lomax family. In creating these recordings, ethnographers of the 30s and 40s have made history readily available to future generations, while also using technology that was new for their time to further spread traditions to those unfamiliar.

As a part of music collected at the wedding of Ben and Rosa Figueroa on February 18, 1939 in Carmel, California, Cowell recorded a song performed by Mr. Figueroa, “Yo ando passando trabajo.” Cowell wrote in the dust jacket that Mr. Figueroa “didn’t want to sing this, but the Irish contractor for whom he works for was drunkenly insistent.” ² In the recording, it seems like he’s is bothered by the fact that he’s performing a song at his own wedding that when translated from yo ando posando trabajo to English means, “I’m going to work.” You can hear his discomfort in what seems to be Mr. Figueroa’s choppy chords and unenthused singing.³. I think this situation is interesting to think about in terms of the BackStory podcast we listened to, “Border Controls: Policing Immigration in America.” Francisco Balderrama says that Mexicans and those of Mexican descent were expelled from America because of “the argument there’s not enough jobs, that jobs were for real Americans.” Additionally, with the hit of the Great Depression, Mexicans were seen as “foreign” and “unwanted” (Balderrama, 2018). ⁴ The fact that Mr. Figueroa is still in America celebrating his wedding means that some Mexican Americans were still able to make a living throughout the era of Mexican repatriation. However, it doesn’t seem as if he had much agency within his situation, especially if his employer was intoxicated and encouraging him to sing a song about work. It shows that despite being in America, some Mexican Americans still were beneath Americans of European descent.

Throughout this time, it also seems as if Mexican American musicians adopted European musical styles and performed them at Mexican celebrations. With the close proximity of various ethnic groups living together in Northern California, this mixing of cultures and traditions would’ve been easy. At the Figueroa wedding, the Anna Magdalena Waltz ⁵ was performed, which is named after Johann Sebastian Bach’s second wife. This, at the very least, shows German influences on Mexican folk music. Cowell wrote in the dust jacket that the orchestra was pleased with their performance because they were used to Mexican waltzes, which went “faster” than European ones ⁶. This diversity in music is referenced in Benjamin Filene’s Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. In the chapter “Searching for Folk Music’s Institutional Niche,” Filene says that folk music became the “embodiments of America’s strength through diversity” (Filene, 2000, p. 133) ⁷. Thanks to new recording technology, Mexican Americans and those of Mexican descent were able to expose themselves to new genres of music while also having their own music shared within the United States, and beyond. Yet, it only seemed like their music was of concern, oppose to their actual livelihoods.

Blog Post 7: The Empire State

While doing this skill assignment, I realized that the American Guide series seemed to focus a lot on the culture and geography of states, instead of really honing in on issues. This statement, however, only really applies to the New York American Guide from 1940 because this is the one that I analyzed and used for my map. For actual research purposes, I would have to read multiple guides from different states to see what those writers and editors chose to emphasize on. No matter what the state, like Marguerite Shaffer quoted in her See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1888-1940, all guides sought out to attempt to create a “‘literature of collective of self-consciousness, a people’s and a nation’s biography, a story of human and physical geography.’ In both its scope and design, the WPA American Guide series manifested this desire to document and design a unique and indigenous American culture” (Shaffer, 2001, p. 203). ¹

In the “Navigating the Green Book” feature by the New York Public Library, I was really surprised to see so few establishments available for people of color in 1947. I was expecting to see a lot more locations open, especially in the North. While looking at it, I thought to myself about how Victor Green went about receiving information about these different establishments. Perhaps, there were more that catered to Black customers, but Green simply didn’t have that knowledge in 1947. In comparison to the 1956 map, the 1947 one seemed to unfortunately lack, in my opinion, enough places to service Black Americans. Seeing the 1956 map made me consider whether or not establishments were moving towards a more tolerant and progressive business structure and started to allow Black people into their stores, or did Green simply learn more information over the decade. In Sarah Bond’s article, “Mapping Racism and Accessing the Success of the Digital Humanities,” she talks about the fact that “people of color have been using maps to visualize racism for a long time,” including W.E.B DuBois and Booker T. Washington in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Bond, 2017, p. 1). ² I think the Green Book series in a way is a continuation of this trend set by prominent Black activists to show America how racist and detrimental it is towards people of color.

I chose the American Guide to New York titled, “New York: A Guide to the Empire State.” I mapped out Tour 21, which featured locations starting in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and ending in New York City, NY. What I found from the coverage of most locations was that the writers tended to focus on the geography of these specific places. Information about the state itself was featured in other sections. The Tour barely talked about the present-day, as in 1940 when the guide was written, locations and the people who inhabited them, but rather the locations in a historical context, as well as their relation to highways and local routes. This is a big contrast to the Green Book. The Green Book didn’t feature as many locations and it only strictly focused on culture (restaurants, lodging, etc.) and not history. There’s history to be found in both, though. In looking at these books, it’s easy to decipher treatment of ethnic Americans at the time. At least for the New York American guide, foreign-born, Black, and Native Americans are all spoken about statistically, and if not statistically, then either not at all or simply blown over. However, the Green Book is essentially always radicalized. Although it’s just a map with safe places for Black Americans to stop on their travels, it’s a historical statement over the fact that guides like that existed in general.

Blog #6: Jazz Music in Chicago

My historical question was originally, “Aside from Federal One projects, how did the arts effect the everyday person in Chicago and New York City, two ethnically diverse cities? Additionally, were these art forms more inclusive and/or accessible to minority racial groups oppose to Federal One projects?” However, as I started to do my research and find narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, I realized that I had to change my question. I found that I was a lot more interested in specifically jazz music, oppose to the overarching arts. My thought process in choosing the second question was trying to figure out how jazz was received in Chicago. I think it’s natural to think about jazz, plays, ballroom parties, etc. in terms of New York, especially coming out of the height of the Harlem Renaissance. I was interested in whether or not jazz had the same kind of prominence in other big, ethnically diverse cities, like Chicago, or was it overshadowed by the uprising of Folk music?

I was worried about finding narratives that would fit my historical question. Most of the narratives seemed to be about the American Slavery experience, not music in their present day. I searched for terms like “music,” “Chicago,” “jazz,” to find the narratives, and made sure they were included in the collection. For the most part, no matter what I searched, I found the same few narratives, but I was able to find enough for the purposes of the Zip drive. Voyant Tools was easy for me to use once I learned how to use some of the visualization mechanisms. I think it was a lot easier to use than some of the other technological sites we’ve used this semester. My favorite tools, and what helped me find answers to my historical question the most, were setting the first block as “Cirrus,” the second block as “Links,” the third block as “Document Terms,” and the bottom right block as “Reader.” In doing this, I could read the narratives and see correlations between words.

Using Voyant Tools, I was shocked to see that there was a correlation between “music” and “California” in the class corpus. I guess I was so caught up in studying my own corpus that I never thought about any other states or cities. In terms of my historical question, I’m unsure if I found an exact answer. However, using the “Links” tool, I realized that in the class corpus, there was a strong connection between “music”and “Chicago,” even amongst 300+ narratives. This doesn’t necessarily mean “jazz,” but I think it would be safe to assume the main music source was jazz. Additionally, if there were 300+ narratives in the class corpus, and “Chicago” and “music” made a match, I think that’s an important fact to identify – the possibility that music in Chicago was more prominent than New York.

I personally liked text analysis. I know in the “Mapping Racism and Accessing the Success of the Digital Humanities” ¹ article we read by Sarah Bond quoted a professor calling the Digital Humanities a “bust,” but this aspect of the Digital Humanities I find highly useful (Bond, 2017). No one in my generation, or future generations I would assume, would have the patience to sift through hundreds or thousands of articles to answer a historical question. In Lauren Tilton’s “Dialect and the Construction of Southern Identity in the Ex-Slave Narratives,” ² she uses text analysis to “show how dialect was not only racialized but also connected to a particular (cultural) geography—the American South” (Tilton, 2019). Tilton could’ve researched this historical question, but her research would’ve probably taken years and would’ve included years of her sifting through documents either on her own or with a team. Thanks to text analysis, she was able to hone in on a specific topic and allow technology to aid her in finding correlations. In my final conclusion, I came up with more of an assumption for my historical question. Yet, I now know that text analysis is a much easier method to approach researching, and will most likely be using it in the future.

Blog Post 5: Interview with Fountain Hughes, Baltimore, Maryland, June 11, 1949

For this assignment, I listened to an interview between Fountain Hughes, a 101-year-old ex-enslaved man, and Hermond Norwood, a WPA interviewer. ¹ Hughes was living in Baltimore at the time of the interview. He previously worked as a manurer hauler when he first moved to the city. In his old age, he mostly stayed in his home and listened to radio as it played old religious songs he grew up hearing. I think this interview shows that even after the abolishment of slavery and the end of Reconstruction, ex-enslaved people still couldn’t find jobs that strayed away from the field. On a brighter note, however, a good portion of this interview deals with religious songs Fountain sung as a boy, and even up until the moment of the interview, which I think shows ex-enslaved people’s relationship and reliance on their religion.

Because of Fountain’s old age, I think it’s interesting to look at my timeline and see the range of events he lived through. He lived through the American Civil War and the establishment of Apartheid in South Africa, two racially charged moments in world history that still have repercussions in today’s society and people still haven’t healed from. This fact also shows the consistency of issues affecting the world at that time, no matter where they took place. What was most surprising was the fact that he didn’t talk about his time of enslavement in depth; though, with his age, it was also understandable. Hughes said he didn’t want to talk about it because he knew it made people feel bad, but when he did talk about, he wasn’t candid about his feelings, which I appreciated. He stated multiple times that being enslaved was like being treated like a “dog,” and that if he had to go back into being enslaved, he’d shoot himself first. I was also surprised by the fact that Norwood, the interviewer, didn’t try to pull answers out of Hughes. He just let him talk freely. Lastly, after having our class discussion on dialect, I was surprised that Hughes had a good grammar structure. I knew his time in school was probably limited, if any, (he did state that slaves weren’t allowed to read), so I was surprised to hear how he spoke and how the only real flaws present were due to him trying to remember and state his thoughts.

Blog Post 3: African American Sharecropping in 1940s Rural Georgia

Although the image I chose for my image analysis was taken in June of 1941, the implications of the Great Depression and the New Deal policies were still clearly in effect. This is essentially how I decided to choose my photo. I saw these African American men and women farming the fields of Georgia for cotton and the despair of the image drew me to it. I figured that even though it was taken in 1941, it could’ve easily been an image from the enslavement era because the realities of it were the same – African Americans were not afforded any type of economic or social opportunities. This is laid out in the American Yawp section, “XII. Equal Rights and the New Deal,” which states that, “Franklin Roosevelt did little to directly address the difficulties black communities faced.” ¹ Additionally, due to the passing of some exclusive laws and acts that particularly only benefited white men in the south, African American citizens couldn’t receive economic aid from the Social Security Act, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act “displaced black tenants and sharecroppers, many of whom were forced to return to their farms as low-paid day labor or to migrate to cities looking for wage work.” ²

A historical question I would explore using this image is how the exclusion of African Americans in New Deal efforts helped promote, or begin, the Great Migration? Is there any correlation? The American Yawp article hints at the answer being yes, but I think it would be worthing exploring at what rate did African Americans from this rural communities travel to cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, Detroit, etc. Furthermore, did the treatment of African American laborers shift during World War II, especially since the photo is from June 1941, right on the brink of American involvement.

I was skeptical of the glitching process before I actually used it. I didn’t understand why the same conclusions couldn’t be drawn by looking at original photos? After my fourth attempt at glitching my own photo, I started to become a believer. As shown in my item and exhibit, I think it’s interesting how there’s a black line perfectly over all of the faces of the sharecroppers, so that all you can see are their legs and equipment working the field. In my mind, I couldn’t think of a better representation of the time. Lawmakers and Southern white men took advantage of the bodies and labor of African Americans, but when it came to giving them rights, seeing them as people with families and necessities, it was impossible. They chose what they wanted to see – and it wasn’t anywhere close to economic equality.

Blog Post #2: Text Searching

Text searching has made interacting with the internet easier, I believe, for the general public. I think it also makes finding information faster. For purposes of research, keyword searching makes finding information less tedious and helps researchers find directly what they’re looking for. However, there are ¹ to keyword searching in digital databases, as we’ve talked about during Prof. Guidone’s presentation.

With the access and digitization of information, there are methodological problems that arise such as creating unnecessary hierarchies, not taking into account gender, and the fact that not everything is digitized. This creates an illusion of comprehensiveness. I think these methodological problems will fix themselves as society becomes more advanced in technology. If people find easier ways to make ² available online, more things can become digitized. Though, I think the main priority is creating a system that can sift through keywords in a more in-depth way.

³ and Prof. Guidone’s presentation both correlate when talking about ⁴. Prof. Guidone referenced many newspaper databases like Readex, archive.org, and hathitrust.org that displayed newspapers from earlier centuries. These databases help digital historians do their research, especially when using keyword searches.

I think digital projects can make significant social change due to the fact that our society is really transfixed on technology. I think if these digital projects are placed in the right place, like social media, it makes it more accessible for people to see and retrieve information. I think my generation is also really involved in social projects, so if it’s digitized, it makes social efforts easier to join and generally be made aware of.

Footnotes:

Pros – access is democratized, speed of research

Cons – original meanings conveyed by touch, surrounding context

Primary sources – anything produced or that existed in the time you’re studying

Ian Milligan’s article – Milligan, Ian.(2013). llusionary order: online databases, optical character recognition, and canadian history, 1997–2010. The Canadian Historical Review, vol. 94, issue 4. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/527016

Digital history – “the application of digital methodologies and media to historical questions”

Blog Post #1

Within the first week of class, I’ve learned a lot more about the 1930s and FDR’s New Deal programs. I remember learning about this topic during 6^thgrade history, but it hasn’t surfaced in my mind since then. I always admired FDR’s New Deal because I was impressed as to how one man could think of so many generally positive programs and pull an entire country out of a Depression. Through the readings, I’ve learned what specifically some of the programs did, as well as the fact that in order to get some of them passed, FDR had to ignore some of the racial inequalities in the South. This hasn’t clouded my views of him and the belief that he was a great and successful president. However, I think I would’ve just admired him even more if he didadvocate for African Americans during that time. One could argue that this advocating was done through the form of his New Deal projects; though, I’m referring more towards civil rights initiatives. Then again, according to the readings, the civil rights movement as we know of today came out of FDR’s lack of action in the 1930s/1940s. So, I suppose, everything worked out positively in the end.

I’ve never taken a class that’s mixed history with technology, so I’m excited for what’s in store for the rest of the semester. Just from this past week, I’m excited to learn more about the 1930s decade and what the country looked like beyond the Great Depression. I’m also not technologically savvy, other than knowing more about social media and my Apple products than my parents, so I’m interested in learning more about the history of technology. How did we get from giant, million-dollar computers to me typing this blog post out on my Mac? More important, why is technology so important to society in general? I think I take for granted going on websites and retrieving information, but it’s rarely that I think about how a website or a technological system is made. Even when I do, I feel like it’s too advanced for me to understand. I hope that through this class, I’ll no longer feel that way and be confident in the fact that I can be a successful, informed creator of technology, too.

The digital project that I analyzed was titled, “Virtual Harlem,” an interactive, visual representation of what Harlem, New York looked like during the Harlem Renaissance. The source is the Harlem Renaissance, “circa 1920 – 1934.” The process included sorting information using radial, index, path, and media visualizations to show connections between prominent figures and their works. Dr. Bryan Carter and students at the University of Arizona presented the website by numbering artists, musicians, and writers vertically down the left-hand sidebar, and providing biographical information, pictures, and/or videos when clicked on their names. They also created the “Virtual Harlem” demo using the Virtual World Web. Additionally, all the website was created using Scalar. I think this was a creative way to show this research because it creates a digital environment that lets students who have no connection or knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance really imagine themselves there, interacting with the times, in a way that I don’t believe a textbook, lecture, or movie can.

Johnston, Jessica. “Virtual Harlem.” An Archive for Virtual Harlem, Scalar, 29 Apr. 2015, scalar.usc.edu/works/harlem-renaissance/title-page. Accessed 2 Sep. 2019.

Boyle, Kevin. “The President Proposes . . .” The New York Times, The New York Times, 5 Apr. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/books/review/fear-itself-by-ira-katznelson.html. Accessed 2 Sep. 2019.