Institute for Ethnic Studies Colloquium focuses on fiction

The main focus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s third Institute for Ethnic Studies Colloquium was the use of fiction to document the history of civil rights.

At the colloquium, a panel of three professors talked about their work studying history and how fiction affects it.

“What we’re going to do is share how we use stories,” said Patrick Jones, an associate professor of history.

He explained to the audience that his work primarily focuses on racial justice in the urban north.

Oral history has been an important part of this, Jones said, because African-Americans have not had a lot of say in political offices.

“If we just rely on traditional sources, what we get is silence,” he said, adding that when information is available from theses sources, it is often distorted or racist.

Looking at oral traditions, then, is important to because it compels people to confront the problem of racial injustice in the urban north, Jones said.

“When we do oral history, it deals with personal relationships,” he said.

Jones gave several examples of complications he dealt with in personal interviews conducted for a book he wrote.

“I needed those stories, but I really had to work through things,” he said.

Ariana Vigil, an assistant professor in English, discussed Latino poetry and civil rights.

She discussed poets Demetria Martinez and Nina Serrano and how their poetry reflected the civil rights struggles of Latinos.

Vigil talked about how Martinez was connected with smuggling during the Sanctuary movement in the 1980s, when Central American refugees in the U.S. were hidden from Immigration and Naturalization services.

Martinez was indicted but still felt silenced, Vigil said.

“She sat in the courtroom and heard her poem used against her,” Vigil said.

Serrano, the other poet Vigil talked about, wrote a poem about the nationalists who assaulted the House of Representatives in 1954 to gain attention for Puerto Rico’s independence.

The last panelist, Kwakiutl Dreher, an associate English professor, talked about how celebrities write about themselves.

“When I talk about celebs writing about themselves, the question that always comes up is ‘Did they write it themselves?’” she said.

These autobiographies talked about how politics has played a role in these entertainers’ lives and reflected not only interracial problems, but intraracial problems as well, Deher said.

“They are record-keepers in how the entertainment industry has felt about black women entertainers,” she said.

kimbuckley@dailynebraskan.com