26 SPRING 2006

BETITA MARTINEZ

CHICANA SPECTATORS AND MEDIAMAKERSOsa Hidalgo de la Riva, editor, Spectator 26:1 (Spring 2006): 27-30

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OSA: Looking back on your career, what do you consider some of your major accomplishments?

ELIZABETH: I guess I’ve worn three hats: one as a writer, one as an activist organizer, and one as a teacher. The activist organizer goes back to my first job when I got out of college. I wanted to work with the United Nations because I was horrified by wars and wanted to help bring about world peace. So I did get a job working in the UN as a researcher for five years. I learned a lot about colonialism, about how people colonize their bodies and their minds all over this planet.

I put that together with the racism I had experienced as the daughter of a very dark-skinned Mexican living in Washington DC. There were about thirty Mexicans there at the time, it wasn’t like today, and most of us were treated a lot like African American folks were in any kind of white situation. So I combined colonialism together with racism and decided that I wanted to do something about it. So the rest of my life in many ways has been devoted to combating racism.

One of the ways to do that, I thought, was through building alliances between different peoples of color. That’s why, in 1997, I started the Institute for MultiRacial Justice with my friend Phil Hutchings, an African American man who was chairman of the Student

Interview:Sept. 23, 2005 – La Mision, SF, CA

Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez is a Chicana activist, author and educator. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2000 from Swarthmore College, and has published six books and many articles on social justice movements in the Americas. Best known is her bilingual volume 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures, which became the basis for a video she co-directed. In 1997 she co-founded and currently directs the Institute for MultiRacial Justice in San Francisco, a resource center that aims to help build alliances between peoples of color and combat divisions. She is one of 1000 women from 150 countries nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

ElizabethMartinez

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Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC. I had been one of two Latinas working on SNCC staff; everyone else was black or white. Black and white was the way of looking at the world in terms of race relations for many years, all black and white although it never has been only those colors--what about the Native Americans, weren’t they here first?

My writing has flowed from the activism. The first book I wrote was called Letters from Mississippi, in which I edited letters that were written to family and friends by the seven hundred volunteers who went to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to help register black voters. Almost no black people were able to register to vote at that time and they were even killed for trying. I was asked by one of the parents to put together a book of the letters that she and others had collected. It was a wonderful experience. I told the story of this summer literally through those letters. The book came out in 1965 and was re-issued again two years ago.. It’s a wonderful book for young people to learn from and to be inspired by, especially white kids because that’s who most of the volunteers were.

Then I did a book called The Youngest Revolution, a personal report on Cuba. I went to Cuba for the first time three months after the overthrow of Batista. I was with my boyfriend, and I said, ‘Hey, let’s go to Cuba, they just had a revolution (laughing). let’s go see what it’s like.’ Wow, wow it was marvelous; people were still dancing in the streets. That was the second book I did. It was published in 1968..

As things went on I did, like several more books that I either wrote or edited with someone else. I did two books on Chicano/Chicanas – the first one was called Viva la Raza!: The Struggle of the Mexican-American People, which was a

book for youth, and I did that together with Enriqueta Vasquez, who did a regular column in El Grito del Norte, the newspaper I started in New Mexico. A book of her columns is coming out later this yearFive Hundred Years of Chicano History in Pictures – that was the next one, completely bilingual, most pictures with small amounts of text. A group of young women did it in New Mexico in 1974. That book was a lot of fun to do. When I look at that book today I’m dazzled. I can’t understand how I got all those pictures in such a short amount of time. The book is still in print today. Teachers use it, people do murals based on the pictures – it’s wonderful how it goes on and on. I’ve even had African Americans say ‘we need a book like this about us, about black history, because there isn’t one.’ My experience with this book has been incredibly satisfying.

I worked on a book about Guatemala and one about Nicaragua that were co-edited with other people. All this writing came out of work that I was doing anyway. I was working on solidarity with the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. For Guatemala, there had been big people’s tribunal in Spain about the crimes against the people in Guatemala since the U.S. overthrow of a progressive government there in 1954, and people like Rigoberta Menchu who were fighting.

So the writing has been related to the work and so is the teaching. I taught Women’s Studies and also Chicano/Chicana Studies at California State University, Hayward and also at Sonoma State as an Adjunct Professor.

OSA: Are you working on a book now?

ELIZABETH: My new book is called 500 Years of Chicana Women’s History. Deciding on the title has been an

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interesting process – can we just say Chicana history and assume that everyone will know that “a” means women or do we have to say women within the title? I polled my advisory board and it came down to about 60/40 in favor of saying “women.” Another question for the board was, should it be Chicana “ch” or Chicana with an “x”? All the young people wanted it with an “x”, but there was also division about that. The great terminology battles happen with any medium, even film.

OSA: Speaking of film, you made a video called Viva la Raza that is one of the foundational educational tools still being used in Ethnic Studies departments. Can you talk a little about your experiences in making the video?

ELIZABETH: When I worked on that video I said I’m not going to ever bother writing another book, videos are so much more fun. But the technical part I never learned. I had to find somebody to make that video and suddenly this guy comes along, Doug Norberg. who had a company called Collision Course Videos. He is an amazing videographer who now goes all over the world and produces videos for different people to use in advancing their struggle. He volunteered to work with me on this video. At the time he was driving a bus from midnight to 8 a.m., so he decided to work on the video after sleeping a little. We had a great time working together.

The first thing of course was to do a script. I wrote one and we got together with about twenty high school or college students to read it and give me their opinion. They were organized by STEP – Student Empowerment Project – which is a youth organization that has taken different names. They read the script gave comments like, ‘Well, I want to hear more about the Zoot Suit Riots’ or ‘That part is boring.’ It was great, I made some revisions and we went into production.

We did Viva la Raza first in English and then we redid the whole thing with Spanish narration. I like the version in Spanish better; it just has more of a real feel to it. The video was done in two half-hour segments, the idea being that a teacher could show the first half hour to a class for discussion and the next day show the second half.. The first half hour is from before Columbus to WWII and the second is WWII to now.

The opening, at the Mission Cultural Center, was a really satisfying experience. I was sitting behind these two young men who were making comments while they were watching it and I finally figured out that one was Mexican and one was from El Salvador. Some footage came up, I don’t remember what it was, and one of them said, ‘See, we have the same problems,’ and I thought, you got it, you just got it! That’s the point we were trying to make. And then coming out of the theater there was one very young boy there. And he said, ‘Wow that was really good, I didn’t know my ancestors invented rubber!’ And of course, as you know, he was talking about the ancient Olmecs, but nobody “made” rubber (Nature did.) These responses were all very satisfying because the whole goal was to educate, unite and so forth.

OSA: Let’s talk about your own experiences with art and film. How do you relate to the moving image?

ELIZABETH: I’ve always cared a lot about both still photography and film. I worked in the Museum of Modern Art where I was the assistant to the director of the photography department, Edward Steichen, who was a major figure in the history of photography. Dozens of people applied for that job, every photography student in New York wanted to work with him. The interview consisted of asking me what I thought of a certain work of

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Beethoven’s. He hired me because I knew nothing about photography, and he wanted some fresh blood that he could mold. So, I had a great time there. It was at a high point of US photographers coming around.

Then I became an editor at Simon and Schuster. The main books I did were about film or books of photographs – I was there five years. The first film book that I did was the screenplays of Ingmar Bergman in English. When you see his films, people are obviously saying more then the titles tell you. I happened to have a friend who was a distributor of Bergman films in New York, and he set me up to get the rights of the screenplays to produce the book. Later I went to meet Bergman in Sweden, and I was the only person besides the film crew that got to see him while he was making a new film. So I got all ready for this lunch, boning up to make sure I had intelligent things to say. Afterwards, I talked to his assistant and asked him what Bergman thought of our lunch. He tried to avoid the question, but finally told me that Ingmar had said ‘She has nice legs.’ So much for my brilliant comments about films!

Then I did another book at Simon & Schuster that was the original screenplay for Part III of the film Ivan the Terrible, which was never finished. Stalin stopped the production of it because he thought they were making the main character too much like himself. So, Parts I and II were finished and released but Part III was never finished.

I am proudest of doing the book The Movement at Simon & Schuster, which

was a historical, photographic book on the civil rights movement, with text by Lorraine Hansberry. It included work by some of the best photographers, black and white, of the southern freedom struggle, and I had the royalties go to SNCC.

OSA: Have you done any writing specifically about film?

ELIZABETH: I wrote articles for Film Quarterly about the French New Wave and other new film-makers. I also wrote a review in The Nation of the Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night. The Nation readers couldn’t believe The Nation was reviewing that movie. I defended it to the death! I wrote a lot about film and went to the festivals, got to meet people like Truffaut, Antonioni. Five years ago, I worked on a review with two friends of the documentary about Students for a Democratic Society. Rebels with a Cause.

OSA: What are your thoughts on the state of contemporary media?

ELIZABETH: Molly Ivins wrote in one of her columns that ‘What’s wrong with the media isn’t so much about control, as it is laziness.’ I think, though, that the larger picture when we talk about the media is who controls it. Who is it for, and who does it reach, those are the things to question. When we look at television, we need to think much more about how much truth it’s telling, what it isn’t telling, what it ignores and what it stresses, etc. It’s a force in people’s lives, but a force for what?