13 10 181 https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/files/original/1889cecb528454849ec8fbed1d12c9ea.mp3 69e8fb585d91537bbcd272920b5d0c87 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral history of Theresa Rios, April 7, 2022 Description An account of the resource Theresa Rios is a retired Escondido librarian, where she created Las Embajadores Biblioteca. In this interview, Theresa discusses teaching children to read, empowering children to learn, and how her childhood impacted her passion for teaching children to read and love learning. This oral history was made possible with generous funding from the Ellie Johns Foundation. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Theresa Rios Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Madison Teater Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-04-07 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Escondido (Calif.) Arizona Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">In copyright</a> Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Theresa Rios License A legal document giving official permission to do something with the resource. <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/files/original/abdeb6b5993217c41d7d8f3dc1554cff.mp4 3c6df60dbdd1c712db4b06dd7a37c483 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral history of Tiffaney Boyd, April 15, 2021 Description An account of the resource Tiffaney Boyd is a CSUSM alumna and former president of Associated Students, Incorporated (ASI). She was a driving force in the creation of the Black Student Center (BSC), Cougar Pantry, and Sigma Gamma Rho. In this interview, Boyd Tiffaney details the process in which she and her fellow ASI cohorts proposed the idea of the BSC. She also discusses the politics that were involved in the process and the major contributors helping to bring the BSC to life. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tiffaney Boyd Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Sierra Jenkins Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021-04-15 Subject The topic of the resource California State University San Marcos. Black Student Center California State University San Marcos. Associated Students Incorporated California State University San Marcos -- Students Activism, Student Black experience in America Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant San Marcos (Calf.) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">In copyright</a> Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Tiffaney Boyd License A legal document giving official permission to do something with the resource. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource moving image Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Boyd Tiffaney_JenkinsSierra_2021-04-15 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Black Student Center Oral History Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral history of Tiffaney Boyd, April 15, 2021 Description An account of the resource Oral history interview of Tiffaney Boyd on 2021-04-15 for the Black Student Center Oral History Project at California State University San Marcos. Tiffaney goes into detail about the process in which she and her fellow Associated Students, Incorporated cohorts proposed the idea of the Black Student Center. She also discusses the politics that were involved in the process and who were major contributors to helping bring the BSC to life. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tiffaney Boyd Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Sierra Jenkins Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2021-04-15 Subject The topic of the resource Black experience in America California State University San Marcos, Associated Students Incorporated California State University San Marcos, Black Student Center California State University San Marcos--Students Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant San Marcos (Calif.) Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">In copyright</a> Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Tiffaney Boyd License A legal document giving official permission to do something with the resource. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Type The nature or genre of the resource moving image Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context BoydTiffaney_JenkinsSierra_2021-04-15 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Black Student Center Oral History Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral Histories Description An account of the resource Video and audio oral histories can be viewed here. Histories are listed alphabetically by last name. Individual histories are indexed and transcribed and can be searched. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <p>Rights to oral histories vary depending on the history. The library owns the copyright to some histories, and has license to reproduce for nonprofit purposes for others. Please contact CSUSM University Library Special Collections at <a href="mailto:%20archives@csusm.edu">archives@csusm.edu</a> with any questions about use.</p> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Jennifer Ho Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dilcie Perez OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PerezDilcie_HoJennifer_2023-05-30.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 Perez, Dilcie. Interview May 30, 2023 SC027-43 01:25:52 SC027 California State University San Marcos University Library Special Collections oral history collection CSUSM This oral history was made possible in collaboration with the Cross-Cultural Center and with generous funding from the Instructionally Related Activities fund. csusm California State University San Marcos. Cross-Cultural Center ; Education, Higher ; California State University. Multicultural Programs ; California State University San Marcos. Student Affirmative Action ; California State University San Marcos. Student Academic Services Outreach Program ; Mural painting and decoration ; Human rights Dilcie Perez Jennifer Ho Video PerezDilcie_HoJennifer_2023-05-30.mp4 1:|14(12)|25(19)|35(6)|51(10)|66(8)|85(4)|98(10)|112(13)|136(9)|154(3)|167(3)|181(15)|195(3)|210(8)|227(5)|246(5)|257(3)|276(8)|297(11)|326(16)|336(17)|354(3)|368(12)|379(6)|397(16)|416(9)|428(16)|441(4)|458(14)|477(6)|489(3)|502(3)|516(13)|530(9)|545(9)|556(5)|568(15)|580(8)|594(7)|608(5)|626(9)|641(8)|657(14)|669(15)|686(7)|700(16)|711(9)|725(14)|740(3)|757(8)|772(4)|786(7)|816(6)|831(15)|843(12)|855(14)|869(5)|882(6)|895(4)|910(9)|924(14)|938(6)|953(13)|971(11)|988(4)|1006(7)|1039(3)|1051(12)|1071(13)|1084(7)|1102(16)|1118(16)|1125(9)|1142(17)|1156(10)|1176(7)|1195(4)|1218(3)|1244(4)|1261(8)|1285(9)|1303(9)|1320(6)|1335(10)|1360(14)|1380(3) 0 https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/files/original/16aaafbcb8a9a79b2431516903eafa19.mp4 Other video english 0 Interview Introduction 0 21 Childhood and Education Perez describes what her life was like as a child from a military family, she traveled to various places and graduated high school in Japan. As an adopted child she describes her family dynamic. Perez then goes on to explain how she collected various credits from community colleges and finished her bachelors at California State University San Marcos and received a Masters at Central Michigan. &#13 ; &#13 ; Adopted ; Bachelors ; Masters ; Military ; Japan ; California State University San Marcos 0 211 Moving to California/ First Impressions of CSUSM Perez moved to California because her husband at the time was to be stationed at Camp Pendleton, California. She then describes that at her CSUSM orientation she realized how advanced the campus was in regards to DEI (Diversity, equity and inclusion) work. Camp Pendleton ; military ; Diversity, equity and inclusion ; California State University San Marcos 0 357 Early Career Experiences Perez worked in Student Affirmative Action (SAA) as a student and was participating in outreach and various programming in schools. After graduating she worked at GEICO in North Carolina and shortly after received a job at CSUSM for a position in Student Academic Services Outreach Program. Student Affirmative Action ; Student Academic Services Outreach Program ; Assistant Outreach Coordinator ; CSUSM ; GEICO 0 537 Experience at CSUSM Perez describes her experience as a non-traditional student since she came in with credits from various community colleges and was married with a full time job. She explains how great the faculty was at CSUSM and how they genuinely cared for their students. Perez created a deep connection with her professors and still considers them as lifetime mentors. She treasures the opportunity to star in a production on campus that expressed the diversity of the lives of seven African women. non-traditional student ; married ; faculty ; CSUSM ; mentor ; Third Word Counselor's Association ; DEI ; Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Wasn’t Enough (Is Enuf) 0 936 Planning the 10th Anniversary Event Perez explains how when she came back to plan the 10th anniversary event for CSUSM the campus was going through an identity crisis. She was trying to make the campus more relatable. CSUSM ; Charger girls ; Jazz ; Mature ; Relatable 0 1170 Cross-Cultural Center Forming Out of a Crisis When Perez was first working at CSUSM there were little to no student-centered spaces. There were political issues on campus and no visible form of DEI being practiced. She quit her position in Student Academic Services Outreach Program (SASOP) due to burnout and in response people in administration provided a new opportunity for Perez, to be the Associate Director of Multicultural Programs in which would mark the beginning of the Cross-Cultural Center. Student Academic Services Outreach Program ; Western Association of Schools and Colleges ; Associate Director of Multicultural Programs 0 1561 Creating a Vision for the Cross-Cultural Center Perez explains how she hit the ground running when she began building Multicultural Programs. She spent time talking to the community and building relationships by creating various programs and events to provide representation on campus. Perez describes the struggle of getting a space on campus for the department and how people undermined the importance of the program itself. Multicultural Program ; Tukwut ; Powwow ; DEIJ ; Cross-Cultural Center ; Multicultural Programs 0 1859 Building a Foundation for the Cross-Cultural Center Perez describes how she would make space deals with various organizations to grow the Cross-Cultural Center. She expresses how she had to manage creating learning outcomes for the students while bringing in new faculty for the center. She explains how it took some years for the campus to adopt diversity practices. Cross-Cultural Center ; Institute for Social Justice and Equity ; WASC ; diversity 0 2211 How CSUSM Shaped Her Perez expresses not only her childhood but the programs and community at CSUSM shaped her into being the person she is today and prepared her for her career. She changed her viewpoint within DEIJ work and realized identity-based centers are only impactful when student support is the main focus. CSUSM ; Veterans Center ; Student Affirmative Action ; Third Word Counseling Association 0 2668 The Role of Identity-Based Centers Perez explains the importance of intersectionality and how the different centers play a role independently but also in unison as one. She explains how the focus should be on social mobility and supporting students regardless of their identity. Perez discusses how different campuses will have a different approach but there should always be a sense of faculty engagement. intesectionality ; identity-based center ; faculty engagement ; support 0 3128 What Students Needed and Addressing Discriminatory Issues Perez discusses how she spent time communicating with staff and students to understand the needs and necessary representation for the campus. She states that it wasn't until she became dean that she got involved in discriminatory issues on campus and recollects specific issues. She describes issues between student and faculty, and between faculty and faculty in which helped her to gain new viewpoints in regards to DEIJ. DEIJ ; Celebration of Culture ; CSUSM ; Gala GATSA 0 3865 Important People That Built the CCC Perez names a few people that helped make the Cross-Cultural Center and worked on building it up in the early years. Cross-Cultural Center 0 4007 The Third Space/ Current Role Perez explains how her research in the concept of the third space showed her how strengths and characteristics of certain cultures can blend into a single space. She discusses her current role (as Deputy Vice Chancellor, Academic and Student Affairs at the CSU) and who she works closely with in carrying out her daily tasks. The Third Space ; CSUSM ; Deputy Vice Chancellor of Academic and Student Affairs 0 4265 Mural for the Cross-Cultural Center Perez discusses how the campus supported DEIJ work and there seemed to be no obstacles along the way. She talks about the making of a mural for the Cross-Cultural Center in which provided a visual marker of unity and diversity for the center. mural ; arts ; Cross-Cultural Center ; DEIJ ; Diversity ; Unity 0 4586 Program Funding/Making Campus Traditions Perez explains how Multicultural Programs was created out of a lottery fund and that they often fought for space on campus. She discusses deals she would make with other programs and how she made connections within the community. Perez recollects on how traditions were made and how she was given total freedom to make big moves on campus. Cross-Cultural Center ; Tukwut Life ; Friday Night ; traditions 0 4873 Proud to Be a Part of CCC Perez expresses her deep gratitude and pride to be apart of creating the CCC and how Floyd Lai has expanded DEIJ work on campus. She explains how faculty has continued to add and beautify the CCC. DEIJ ; Proud ; Mad As Hell ; Social Justice Summit 0 Video Dilcie Perez is a California State University San Marcos (CSUSM) alumna. She graduated with her degree in Bachelors of Arts in Political Science. In this interview, Perez explains how CSUSM was ahead of its time in regards to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) work ; however at the beginning of her employment with CSUSM, the university did not have Multicultural Programs (the predecessor to the Cross-Cultural Center). Perez recalls her work with Multicultural Programs, including her being offered the opportunity to open the program upon tendering her resignation to the university. Jennifer Ho: Okay. Today is May 30th, 2023. My name is Jennifer Ho, and I am interviewing Dr. Dilcie Perez for the CSUSM (California State University San Marcos) Cross-Cultural Center (CCC) Oral History Project. Thank you so much for being with me today, Dr. Perez. How are you? Dilcie Perez: Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity. Ho: Great. Okay, so I just wanted to start with a little bit about you personally. Can you tell me where you're from? Perez: No (both laugh). So I grew up in a military family, so I had the wonderful opportunity to live in places like Arizona and Maine and California, and Okinawa and traveled around and graduated high school in Okinawa, Japan. And moved to California as--in the nineties, early nineties. And had started , when I graduated high school in Japan, I wasn't sure where I wanted to go to college. And so I kind of took a lot of classes at community colleges. And when I moved to California someone said to me, “Have you ever heard of a place called Cal(ifornia) State San Marcos?” And at that time, I had not. And so they said, “Oh, they have programs at the time for juniors and seniors, and so you should check them out.” And so I applied to go to school at San Marcos and was accepted. And so I can talk about that later, obviously. But I, my, I come from a family of--I have my parents and I have two brothers, and I am the only girl and the youngest. However, I was also adopted, and so found my biological family later in life. And so in that family, I am the oldest of three girls. And so, have a wonderfully blended family. My education, I graduated from Cal State San Marcos in (19)94-ish. And I say that because I had the wonderful opportunity to speak at commencement in (19)94 as the speaker, one of the student speakers. And, and I think my speech might, I don't know if it's in the archives, but there's gotta be some video or something of all the, the different commencements. But moved immediately after that to North Carolina and had two classes to finish. And so I was also pregnant at the time, and so it took me about a year to get those two classes done. So I walked in (19)94, but my, my diploma says (19)95. And came back to San Marcos and then went and got my master's at Central Michigan. So they have--they had a military on-base education. And so they would fly out the instructors from Central Michigan to do an executive master's program. And this is back in the early 2000s. So this was years ago. And then I waited thirteen years to go back and get my doctorate from San Diego State in educational leadership with the emphasis in community college. Ho: Thank you. Can I ask you what brought you out to California in the first place? Perez: Yeah, the military. So I met my ex-husband in Okinawa, and then we moved to North Carolina, and then he received orders to Camp Pendleton. And so we lived in Oceanside actually at that time, and then I went to school. Ho: Okay. Okay. That's great. What were your impressions of--of California, of San Diego, of Oceanside when you, when you arrived for the first time? Perez: Yeah, I don't think that I had anything particularly of California. Because I traveled the world. And so it was another place. I remember living in--off of Mission Avenue and just appreciating being close to the beach and the weather. And but I will tell you this, that I came, so when this was (19)91-ish. And when someone referenced, like to go to Cal State San Marcos, and I say this, I tell the story all the time: that when I applied to Cal State San Marcos, got accepted, I went to orientation. And orientation at that time in 1992 was at Cal State Jerome's. So you've probably heard the stories across the street. Ho: Yep. Perez: And I can see it. One, I will tell you, I still have my 1992 orientation binder that I received when I came. Still. So I've traveled and moved. But I recently was, you know, consolidating. I was like, “No, I'm keeping this, like this is good, important stuff in 1992.” And I will tell you that what is pivotal for me of having been in a military family traveling the world, that I remember walking out of orientation feeling like it was a place that I belonged because of the message of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And, you know, in (19)92, we didn't always use those words. Ho: Right. Perez: But, but diversity was a value for the campus from the start. And I remember people, someone at orientation saying, “We don't want to be a melting pot. That's old, outdated language.” And this was in (19)92, right? “Because a melting pot blends everyone together, and you can't tell the difference. We wanna be a salad bowl and we want everyone to have a unique.” And so that resonated with me that I felt like I found a place, even at my orientation in 1992 at Cal State San Marcos. Ho: Wow, that's, that's amazing. That's really great to hear. So is that--just to fast forward a little bit, is that what brought you back to CSUSM? Perez: That's interesting. So literally when I worked in as a student, I worked in what was at the time Student Affirmative Action. So they called it SAA. Someone by the name of Denise Hollis became a mentor. I think Eric Cardoso or folks in Student Affirmative Action (Program). And this was obviously before Prop 209. That then started to abolish offices such as that, right? And so when I worked in those areas and SASOP (Student Academic Services Outreach Program) and stuff, I was a student going out and doing motivational outreach. So we would do programs in schools, and I was going out doing that, and I had such a powerful experience as a student. And I moved to North Carolina right after I graduated for a year and a half, two years. And when I came back, I was at a party, like a barbecue, I can't remember. And someone said to me, “Hey, you know I got a new job.” It was somebody that I worked for. She said, “I got a new job.” And I was like, “Ah, I want your job.” Like, “I want your job.” And she just started laughing. She was like, “Ha.” I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no. I really want your job.” Like, “What do I need to do?” And her assignment was temporary. And so this was--so really why I came back to work was because there was a temporary opportunity. It was an Assistant Outreach Coordinator in Student Academic Services Outreach Program. And so I started back at the campus that I love so much, and really in official capacity doing what I had done as a student. Ho: That's wonderful. And was that after you got your, your doctorate from SDSU? Perez: No. So this is all in 1998, (19)90. So I graduated in (19)95. I was in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And then I came back, I think in (19)97 and worked for GEICO, did temp work. I was like, “What's my life's purpose? Where am I headed? What am I doing?” And then I met her at this party or saw her again at this party. And then the rest is history about (CSU) San Marcos, because I left, there's a lot to the story. But I left, but stayed for a long time and really had a great professional experience. Ho: That's wonderful. Do you remember the name of the person from the party? Perez: Oh, Mary Wardell. Um-hmm. Ho: Mary Wardell. Perez: Yeah. She was, she worked in Student Affirmative Action, and she moved and went to the Dean of Students' Office, was an Assistant Dean of Students. And that's when I saw her. 'Cause she had just received that pro-- promotion. Now she works at--she moved to, I think, University of the Pacific, but she does DEI work, she’s done written books and done amazing things in this area. Yeah. Ho: Thank you. Perez: Yeah. Ho: So now backtracking again. I wanna hear about your time as a student, because obviously it had a profound impact on you. So, so did it meet--did being a student meet your expectations after that orientation? And can you tell me about some experiences on campus and the people that you met and some pivotal moments? Perez: Oh, I love it! So I will tell you that I (laughs)--I, I had a fun experience at (California State) San Marcos, but I wasn't your traditional student. Like, I didn't know what a Dean of Students was. I didn't know about higher education. I knew that I had gone, I didn't learn this until later. I'd gone to like six different community colleges picking up classes. I spent time at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, picking up classes. So I was going to school constantly, but picking up classes as we traveled. And so when I got to, you know, (CSU) San Marcos, it--you have to remember the culture was so different because it was so small and the faculty and the students were so tight. And when I arrived, there were no first year students. It was only juniors and seniors. And we only had three buildings. So Science Hall, Academic Hall, and maybe well, Administration Building, Craven, which is not Craven anymore. So it was those three buildings. And I will say to you that I was married, right? And so I was working during the day, I was going to school, and I took classes. I will tell you, that's really profound. And to this point, I'm still connected to these faculty members today. Leslie Zomalt. So, you know, the (Ernest and Leslie) Zomalt Award they're very, I'm very close to them. She was my faculty member in California History and we're still close. And she gave me a B! Like a B, a B. So I was like, “Why do I like you so much? You gave me a B.” But she was so good because she would, what I loved about her--I was going through a personal, difficult personal situation during that time, and I must have missed class or something must have happened that, she called me and she said, “I realize that you're not around. I wanna check on you and see how you're doing.” And that was pivotal to me. I remember that she went to a conference and she loves to read. She still loves to--I, I'm going to her house for quilting. She got me connected to quilting. I hate quilting. I hate it. I hate it. But I love you know, I, when I came back one time, I said to her, “Will you make me a quilt?” Is what I said to her. Literally this bold. And she said, “I will not make you a quilt. I will teach you how to quilt.” And I was like, “Ah, okay.” So, but every year, for about ten to fifteen years, we have quilted at her house for a year, for at one time a year. Now, I don't quilt any other time. I still hate quilting. But I love the sense of community and the mentorship and the love that goes into it, that I literally will quilt one thing within my range once a year when I go. And so I will say to you that what I think about at San Mar--and Jill Watts. So let me tell you, Jill Watts is still there. She is a historian beyond historians. And, and I talked about her in, in my commencement speech that the best African American History class I have ever taken is by a white woman. Hands down. She is brilliant. She is, you know, phenomenal. It's funny, even when I worked at (California State) San Marcos, I wouldn't see her as much, but she would just beam every time that she saw me because she knew who I was as a student. I remember that Peter Zwick, I don't know if you've heard that name. He used to be over (at) Global Affairs at the time, but was really a hard, hard political science instructor. Like people were scared of him. Hard. And I decided, 'cause I was lost, I was gonna do Poli Sci as a major. And he, I went to him, who's my faculty advisor too. He must've been. And I sat there and I said, “I'm graduating in May.” And he was like, “Dilcie, how are you graduating when you haven't hardly taken any political science classes?” I was like, “It’s a technicality. Technicality.” So I took twenty-one units, most of those political science classes, upper division in one semester. Ho: Wow! Perez: I thought I was going to die. And I think a few of them, 'cause he was a hard one, like one or two were with him. But I will tell you this, is that one, it was hard 'cause I was working and taking twenty-one units and picking up. But I will tell you that that was the best I did. That was the only semester I've ever made Dean's list (laughs) in my college career, because I knew I didn't have a lot of room to play. But I will say to you that as I think about (Cal State) San Marcos, it was pivotal to me because of the relationships, particularly with faculty that I established. Denise Hollis was administration, but we were, we used to go to a Third Word Counselor's Association. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but it was years ago, and it was doing DEI work, and they were taking us there to those events. But even during the time, so I didn't get involved in a lot of co-curricular events. I have a colleague now, that used to work at Chancellor's Office and I just had an event for her. And I was like, we went to college together at (CSU) San Marcos. She's very--Sabrina Sanders. We went to college. And I was like, I don't completely remember her, but we went to college together. Right. Because she remembers me. And I just wasn't involved in a co-curricular way. So I would tell you my co-curricular experience really was the relationships with them. But we did a play. So this is in the archives as well, but for Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Wasn’t Enough (Is Enuf). Ho: Okay. Perez: We, we all practiced for months. I--months on weekends and nights and did this two-weekend play or maybe one weekend. And it was in like the school newspaper. Gezai (Berhane) showed it to me later, that we all did this play. It was sold out in ACD 102 sold out. It was just wonderful. That--those are the pivotal moments for me. My orientation, my relationship with faculty, my--spending time in that (production). That's what I think when I think about my (CSU) San Marcos experience that I treasure the most. Ho: That's lovely. Thank you. And what did you say the title of that play was? Perez: For Color Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow (Is) Enuf. So it's about seven African American women and the diversity of their life. Ho: Thank you. Perez: Yeah, it has some pretty heavy topics in it, quite honestly. And so that's what made it so impressive quite honestly. Yeah. Ho: And can you speak a bit about--about the culture on campus for you as a student? Whatever comes to mind, but in particular I'm interested in, in culture and community and, and DEI and, and different groups of students. Perez: So, that's an interesting, I am grateful for this question. I don't think that I was mindful enough to know at the time with words and language what I was experiencing. I think I felt like I mattered. That I was making relationships and making connections. And I, and I hate to--I don't always like the cliche of mattering and belonging because I think people have to unpack that and think about what that means. But I will tell you, I felt like I belonged at (CSU) San Marcos from day one. From day one. And so--but I also didn't have a lot of needs, right? So at that point in time for the two years that I was there, two or three I think it served the need that I had as a non-traditional student. When I came back in (19)97, the campus had changed because the first-year students came in (19)95. So it was not the same. We--I could tell we were going through an identity crisis, right? We were planning the 10th anniversary event when I returned, and I brought the (laughs) Charger girls. I was gonna bring them to the event. And I don't know if you know, but back in the day and you have to be careful about this, this part, but back in the day we had a librarian who was heavily involved in the campus and (laughs). Ho: Okay Perez: And there was a lot of music, it (was) like jazz, right? That works for an older population. And so it was wonderful for the campus when there was juniors and seniors and older people, but first-year students and sophomores (laughs), I don’t--jazz isn’t it all--like, we have to be more than that. And so I really was proud of myself, quite honestly. And I was like, I got the Charger girls! They're coming into this event. They literally took me to, we--I don't know if you've heard of Surge? So Surge used to be the coffee shop. Ho: Okay. Perez: That was on the corner, kind of down by--by Block C by, you know where the quad is? It was on the corner there. There's a real estate office there now. They took me down to the Surge for coffee and they said, “We don't want T&amp ; A at our event.” Like, and I said, “What? Like, the Charger girls are like, like professionals (laughs)! Like they, they're not, they're not T&amp ; A, what’re you talking about?” But they would not let me bring the Charger girls to that event. I had to cancel them. Ho: Oh my goodness. Wow. Perez: And I think that the campus was in that transition from this kind of older and more mature thing to saying we have to be more relate--like, I was trying to push us to be more relatable and it did not work that day at all (laughs). Ho: Wow, what a conversation that must have been. Perez: Oh, it was fun. But you know, I've always, I've always liked to get into good trouble, right? Ho: Yeah. Perez: And so for me it was then how are we meeting the needs of students? Because what we, what we did for, it was supposed to be like 10th anniversary in a preview day, and it really was just, you know, the same old thing that we had been doing all of that, that time period. So-- Ho: Okay. Perez: Yeah. Ho: Did--are you saying the event turned out to be kind of the same old, same old? Perez: Uh-huh, uh-huh. Ho: Okay. Okay. Perez: 10th anniversary jazz ensemble (laughs). Yeah. Ho: Okay. Okay. Perez: And people showed up, but it wasn't what you really would think of, of a traditional college experience. So we went through transitional times such as that. Ho: Okay. Well that's a good segue into the Cross-Cultural Center then. So when you were a student at that time, there was not a Cross-Cultural Center, is that correct? Perez: That's correct. Ho: Okay. So when you came back to CSUSM in a staff role what are your first memories of rumblings of a Cross-Cultural Center, of a Multicultural Center? Do you remember? Perez: None. None. So let me put the context around, and this is where it--it's a, it's an interesting story. So if I go back to (19)98, (19)97, I worked in Student Academic Services Outreach Program. So SASOP doing early outreach, motivation, academic preparation. And I would say that that team and the people were diverse. We had the Dome (food services originally operated by San Diego State University’s Aztec Shops) as a space, which was really, if I remember correctly, only the primary kind of student-centered space. There wasn't a lot, you had lunch there, right? And you ate there, everything happened in the Dome. I would say to you, we were going through as a division, a lot of work around our values and trying to clarify and integrate our values in our, in for the team. And I would say to you what was hard, I'm trying to remember. I remember that there were WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges) self-study and that it came back with some campus climate challenges. Ho: Uh-hmm. Perez: And I remember, and all my years kind of blur, right? So, but I have a time period of when, like pre--I have to explain it. But when I was in SASOP, I was heavily involved in a lot of different things. In outreach. And I remember, I think during that time, there was a noose hanging on the tree outside of Academic Hall. Not, excuse me, I'm lying to you. Outside of the Administration Building. So that fifth, fifth floor, you have Founders' Plaza, there was that--there's a tree there. Ho: Yeah. Perez: That tree had a noose. And so that caused a lot of energy. So the part that's interesting is that I was heavily involved in the community. I was working tremendously. And I think I had kind of burnt out, honestly, in outreach. So I was there five and a half, six years, and I had been thinking about, I need to change. I need to do something differently. And so I was driving to work one day, and I had talked to my ex-husband. I was like, “I think I'm, I'm done. Like, I'm tired, like I'm exhausted.” And he, he said, “(I) support you, do what you need to do.” And I had written a letter and I had it for like months and I hadn't done anything with it. And then one day I was driving to work and I can tell you exactly where I was when I was driving to work. And I said, “I'm done.” And so I came in to the office and I gave them my notice. And one thing that I will tell you is that when someone quits a job and gets another job, most people will say, “Oh, Jennifer got another job. She's moving on to better things.” Well, you get a lot of attention when you say, “I'm leaving.” And they're like, “Where are you going?” And I'm like, “Nowhere. I'm just done here.” And so folks in administration came to me and they said, “Hey, you know, we don't want you to leave. What's going on?” And one of the administrators said, “If we create an opportunity for you, will you stay?” And I was like, “Eh, I don't, I don't think so. No, no, no. I--I'm pretty tired.” And the campus threw a big going away party for me, huge. But what they had said to me is, “Leave, go ahead. Take two weeks. Don't, we're not gonna submit everything. You go think about this opportunity and let us know.” And I will tell you that it was until that last day, I think they had given me till 1:00 PM and they said, and I called at twelve fifty-five because I wasn't going to do it. I was tired. And the opportunity that they had was the Associate Director of Multicultural Programs. And so that was the first start to the Cross-Cultural Center. So that is how, honestly, it really--and so I'll tell you that what I know now, after I got into that position was we were doing 2010 visioning at that time. And I, this was, you're talking 2002 when I, when I shifted. Two thousand two/three. And they had already, I would say Jonathan Pollard, you've probably heard that name, and Bridget Blanshan. Ho: Uh-hmm. Perez: They had done some visioning, 2010 visioning. And, and I don't know, I could, I don't, I can't dig probably for you, but they have it-- Ho: Um-hmm. Perez: This document. And in it, they had said they wanted to open Multicultural Programs and hire and do a space. So what happened, I believe, is that there was me saying, “I'm outta (laughs). I'm gone.” The campus not wanting to necessarily just let me walk away. And knowing they had an opportunity for strength and growth under Bridget is when I accepted and changed and came and opened Multicultural Programs. Ho: Wow. It's a good thing you put in that notice. Perez: Oh, who you telling (Ho laughs)? 'Cause the campus one, I'll tell you this. And if I'm being quite honest, and I, if I had tried to apply for that type of role--as an outsider to a place, I don't, I would've not received that role. I didn't have the pedigree. I didn't have, you know, sure I had some of the education, but what people used to say at the time is that you're not a traditional Student Affairs practitioner. And I actually resent that type of statement because I don't think there's a traditional student affairs person anymore. Like that's old thinking. Ho: Uh-hmm. Perez: But I would say to you that I think I wouldn't have, I, what, what I believe was happening is I had established strong relationships. People knew my quality of work, knew that I would come in and at least set the ground running. That, that that's what I did. And so, honestly, when I came in, started the position, and literally I was in a cubicle inside on the fourth floor of Craven (Hall) and really had to set the, the vision. And so I met with nineteen, twenty people and I said, “What are our needs on campus? What do we think we should be doing? What do you want Multicultural Programs to be?” And I created oh my gosh, so many programs that first year. Like I was a party of one and a student assistant. But we started, I remember, oh, I can't remember. There's, there has to be somewhere. I did a flag, it had international flags everywhere. And we did a culture of celebration, or celebration of culture. Celebration of Culture was the first event. And then in that time, we started with--I partnered with Jonathan (Pollard) to start the African American Faculty Staff Association. We did the fires. We had the (brush) fires. And so we, because part of my job was volunteerism too. They threw volunteerism and engagement in there. So I did a fire, a drive, a, a clothing drive for the for out of the center for the victims of the fire. I did Soul Food Lunch, helped start Soul Food Lunch, which is gone now, but Soul Food Lunch, I think we did over 20 programs that first year that I was there. But it was all because of what people told me they wanted and what we needed. Oh, Powwow! I did the planning of the (Tukwut) Powwow with everyone. I, oh man. I could try and go back. Like we just, it, it really, I was, it was a way in which I could engage the community and build relationships across the campus. And so that is the foundation for how I really began to, I think cement my knowledge base in DEIJ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice). Was really kind of this piecemealing and building. And so the piece that I will tell you is I, between Bridget (Blanshan) and I, I can't--we advocated for the space next door to Student Life and Leadership. And it's a square wall. It was it--that room? Hon--it is so small. Do you hear me? It is so small. But, we put a couch. I went and got a couch from (unclear) who, I don't know if you know her, she works. I went to her house and picked up a couch. We got--we built me a cubicle in there because I thought it was important to have a separation of space between any students. We did all this stuff. Oh my gosh. We were in there and they tried to come and take that space. I remember one of our academic colleagues, literally, I was sitting in the space and I turned around and she's standing there summing up the space for sure. And didn't say a word to me, and then turned around and walked out. And I remember going to Bridget and saying, “You've got to be kidding me. Right?” Like, you can't come while someone's sitting in the space trying to sum it up for, 'cause space wars were real. Ho: Um-hmm. Perez: And I think at that time, people didn't realize the power of a Cross-Cultural Center. And there was intentionality and, you know, we called it Multicultural Programs. And then I opened up the Cross-Cultural Center, and literally, as I see how you've written it, we had, do you put the dash in between Cross-Cultural Center and do we not? And later on there was the, the version of, is it C3, which we branded and branded well. And then, then people hated that brand, and then they had to move, which is fine, right? But I often, I laugh because I can't believe that the Cross-Cultural name has still stayed. And, and I'm exceptionally proud. This part, we may not wanna put too public, but that's the one center that has had no controversy (laughs) on the campus. Ho: Really (both talking)? Perez: Right? Yeah. Ho: So there was no pushback or anything when you started? Perez: Nah, Nah, none. No. Um-um. And they could have. But I think because the campus was small, I had great relationships. The way in which I did--did it in relationship. It was a community effort. People were engaged, people were support(ive). None. None. But I will say to you too that the way in which we approached DEI work was pretty soft at that time. You know, it was a very supportive nature. I wasn't tackling policy. I wasn't, you know, tackling searches and recruitments, and I was building community and that level of awareness around what we can do collectively. I think I wrote a mission in the beginning. But here's the thing: I will tell you that I was, in my humble opinion, the grassroots person, because I got it going. And gave, gave. And then I was there 18 months maybe, and then I moved to Japan. And when I came back, Alexis Motevirgin had taken it to a more formal place. And, and I was like, I think we had a mission statement back then? But Alexis, I think really formalized the mission and the work. I just, I just was the grassroots starter for all of that at the time. And then Alexis came, stayed just a few months, right? And then I, I think that I hired Augie (Augustin Garibay) and he didn't stay very long. Augie Garibay and then hired Sara, Sara Sheikh. And then she stayed for a little bit and moved on. And then Floyd (Lai), and he's the longest standing. Really, I think built a solid foundation. I was there. So this is where it gets weird. Because I was, I would say the associate director, or the first, however we wanna frame it for Cross-Cultural Center. But I was there from 2003-ish to (200)4 into (200)4, so probably eighteen months. And then I went to Japan, and I was gone a year and a half, and then I came back. So part of my work in the evolution of the Cross-Cultural Center, was when I was the Director of Student Life, and it was in my portfolio. So had the ability--so I was making--I hate, I feel awkward because it's almost like you're bragging. And so I'm trying not to brag. But we used to make lots of deals back then. So I would hustle to make deals for space, quite honestly. And so--we moved Student Life. So this was part of the plan. We moved Student Life to third floor, right? And that in the rotunda, I don't know what's the, it's Guardian Scholars, I think there're now, but it has a weird kind of diagonal room. Ho: Um-huh. Perez: So we went from the fourth floor down to the rotunda, and it was small in an awkward space, small. So we were there not too long. And then I worked a deal to switch. We put Leadership Programs down, I believe, or student org(anization)s down in the rotunda and in Commons 206 area, right across where I think Alumni Affairs is. We got a really good space and partnered with ASI (Associated Students Incorporated), they gave us that space to put the Cross-Cultural Center up there. And that's when the Cross-Cultural Center got its real visibility because it was in a prominent space, gorgeous space. Great. We had couches. Alexis, you might hear in stories about these beautiful red couches. So by the time I came back from Japan, these beautiful red couches were in the space. Those couches have lasted for a long time. People used those couches. I, when I got back, I actually--I tell people at the Chancellor's Office, bought a TV for the space. I wanted to buy a TV to do announcements on this, on the thing. And this isn't, you're talking about 2000. Whatever. And Bridget was so cute. She was like, “What are your student learning outcomes for them?” And I was like, “What?” So, you know, I had to, you know, write whatever. And then some things happened with staffing, and someone filed a whistleblower on me for buying the TV. Because I bought the TV. Uh-huh. And so I had to defend at the--for the Chancellor's office why I bought this TV for this Cross-Cultural Center back in the day. So it's interesting that what we consider is normal, were some things that as you build the infrastructure, right? And, you know, when you build something like this, people want it to be all things to all people. And I think that when I started, that was easy because it was just building. But as you've seen the iteration, I think each of the people who have led it have really had to think about what is the purpose of the center and the space, and how can it be most effective? Ho: So then when you were, when you were building, what was the purpose of it in your mind? Perez: Yeah. I think one, to provide space, a safe space for our students. To be a centralized resource and location. So I would say to you that in some ways I was, you know, the start of a diversity person on the campus in that realm. It was kind of a catchall at that time. I think that it, it--whether articulated or not, was to build really kind of the celebratory awareness events. And have the visibility and do that work to acknowledge the diversity of our communities on the campuses. And I--I'm having a hard time kind of remembering between the two roles, but I began to get brought into, we had an Institute for Social Justice and Equity that was created, a center. And that when I got back, we were heavily involved in. A lot of the bias response pieces because of student life I was involved in. And so I think it became a resource. And when I got back from the CSU--when I got back from Japan, I will tell you that it was then that I--we got really involved in more serious things. So some of the campus climate pieces, the WASC pieces, there was a, maybe diversity committee that was working on a diversity statement for the campus that I think we worked on that for a long time and it never got out. But what did get out of that, or come out of that work on that committee was the very first Diversity Officer. And so that was Gary Rollinson, who then I think in that. Dowd, spent some time in that. And then, you know, (Willie) “Derrick” Crawford, and then now, you know, there's Arturo Ocampo and then Aswad (Allen, current Chief Diversity Officer). So I think it was the foundational really for a lot of the diversity work that was happening on the campus. Ho: So you mentioned when we first started this conversation, you were really a part of a lot of different communities as a kid. So military, you were adopted, which I imagine had a profound impact on your sense of identity and being. And then moving from place to place and having to integrate yourself into these different places. So do you think that that this childhood experience of--of being maybe different in so many ways from so many different people, had any impact on, on this career that you found yourself in at CSUSM? Perez: Oh, I love this question. I don't know. When I was doing my doctoral work there was a pivotal, a quote that has been pivotal to my life. It says, “Everything changes, everything's connected, pay attention.” And I would say to you that while I was trying to figure out what the purpose of my life was going to be, (laughs) working at GEICO, coming to work in outreach, right? Susan Mitchell, who has since passed away, was a great mentor in telling me I was a leader without the position. Like in instilling this belief in me, I would say to you that every experience I had at (CSU) San Marcos prepared me for that role. That my work in outreach and Student Affirmative Action to the Third Word Counseling Association that I talked to you about, to the outreach to the people that I worked with and the value statements to the engagement that I had as a student. Yeah. I mean, all of that. I think you pull from those as tools, right? What I do think helped is I love the community. And I think to your point I don't think even then I understood as a student what it meant to be an African American woman. I don't know that I understood how all of my identities felt, but I did know what it meant to feel like you mattered and belonged, and how to resource and the support on the campus. That even though I'm not first gen(eration), both of my parents went to college, I know I struggled at points. Like, it wasn't until I applied to go to grad school that I realized I pulled my (CSU) San Marcos transcript, and I was like, “Really? I wasn't that bad of a student. Why did I feel like I wasn't a good student?” Like, I literally did not see myself as a good student, right? I was just doing what I needed to do to possibly get out. You know, my GPA ended up like a 3.11, but all the stuff I was doing and the movement and the, you know--but I, I would say to you that I think that sure, I pull on all of that because you want students to have a good experience. And what has happened since then with my research around a concept called Third Space, I do believe it's our role to break down any obstacles and challenges that students have to face. And I think that's the way in which I've approached the work is that sometimes it's, it's our organizational structures that are weeding students out. And that to me is probably the greatest social inequity of all. Ho: Especially on a college campus of all things. Perez: Especially on a college campus. That's supposed to, while we reflect society, we should often we should be a safe space. Ho: Hmm. Perez: I will tell you that during my time, so you're talking when I was director of SLL (Student Life and Leadership), then the Associate Dean, then Dean of Students, right? So all these are kind of merged, but once the Cross-Cultural Center opened, I had the opportunity to partner with John Segoria and Vicki Hernandez to open the Veterans Center. Then the president pulled on a team of us after a list of demands. And I just, I had the opportunity a few years ago to participate in the Latino Resource Center and helping them get started. And that came out of crisis. And so we created that. That I--I was gonna tell you some piece about that, but oh, that Floyd had invited me back, I think, for the 15th year. Or whatever. And when we were opening the Latino Resource Center, some folks thought that as we were having that, I would, I would raise questions. And I said, “If we, if we open a Latino Resource Center (Latin /X Center), are we ready to open a center for all identities?” Because that's what's gonna happen. And I'm, and, and people thought I was against it, and I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no.” Because if you look, we had started the Cross-Cultural Center because we understood that the intersectionality of all of our identities. And so we were trying to build the model originally off of the value of the intersectionality. Right? And then as life happens in society and on the campus, there was a need. And so the Latino Resource Center, I was like, I'm not against it. I'm just asking are we ready to open additional centers? And to the president's credit, she was , because then the Black Resource Center (Black Student Center) came, the Dreamer Center came, right? And additional centers. And so I will tell you that when he invited me to come back for the 15th year and speak, I wrote a speech that I had to think about because I was like, where am I at? Is it Cross-Cultural Center or is it all the different identity-based centers? And I will tell you, I was at MiraCosta (Community College) at the time, and I wrote in the speech, I said, until we make DEIJ training mandatory across the institution, because the reality is those that choose to come to the trainings do, but those aren't the folks who are making it a chilly spot. Not always discriminatory, but chilly, and making it difficult for students until they are mandated to go to training and they get to opt out. Oh, we best believe we need centers. Ho: Um-hmm. Perez: To get rid of all of the isms, to get rid of all the things that are hindering our students. You absolutely need a safe space. And so I am for whatever identity-based center we feel like we need that can validate students, provide the academic and co-curricular support to students all day, every day. So I put that in the speech, right? That at, at the 15th (year) and tell me that the students at MiraCosta got a hold of that speech somehow, and they were trying to fight for a Latino center. And they quoted that speech and plastered it all over campus, because they also feel like if she's saying that we need that there, why wouldn't we need that here? And so, I will tell you, I've shifted my approach, actually. I think cross-cultural is important, but I, I think identity-based centers as we need them, are critically important until we're going to focus on the entire organization and hold everyone accountable to creating student support. You know, it's not, I--I really, quite honestly, you have a choice to believe what you want to believe. I'm not here to, to force people to believe. But what you can't do, or what you won't do is weed a student out because of your beliefs. Ho: Um-hmm. Perez: Or cause an obstacle for a student. That, that we, we need to understand that there are societal injustices, that mirror themselves in our college campuses that we need to mitigate if we're really truly serious about doing this work. Ho: Could you elaborate a bit on--on why identity focused centers are so important and also their relationship to a, a Multicultural Center? Like what, what is, what is the difference, frankly? Perez: Well, I don't know. And I, and I would tell you, I think Floyd's been working on that, right? Because what you probably know is that we had so many discussions in the beginning because the students, it was always busy in the Cross-Cultural Center. But it was our APIDA (Asian-Pacific Islander Desi American) students that were in there and using the space. And so people were like, “Well, you have to have an APIDA center 'cause that's who's in there.” And we had so many conversations in the beginning around how do you diversify the space. Because it's not just about our APIDA students. The reality is it is any student taking territory. Claiming territory. Like what do you do to make sure the space is, you know, culturally diverse? And at some point, we just gave up quite honestly, because we didn't feel like that was our right to then try and mess with the dynamics. Like create a space where people, if they choose to walk in the door, that they would feel welcome. Does that make sense? But we will not exclude anyone from the spaces like the space. That's what it is here for. And so, I will tell you that I think that I don't know, and I haven't been connected in a very long time, in an in-depth way, if we have ever clearly achieved the, the goal of the intersectionality and how a Cross-Cultural center or could really, really benefit that. I think you would, quite honestly, there's nuances between multicultural and cross-cultural, right? And I think you will play, people don't call, and they may now. Multicultural. And so Multicultural Programs died that, that term. I think I-- and Floyd had it in his title for a while, but I can't remember where that ended up. But I would say to you that I think as we think about the future, that really is the essence. That the identity-based senders, I don't, you can't silo my identity, right? So I am an African-American woman. Does that make sense? I am a military dependent family member. That is a huge, huge part of my identity. I am a woman. Gender Equity Center. I am an ally to LGBTQ. Like, so to think that a student, we can silo the identities of students? But what I will tell you is this, I find community in ways that are authentic to me. So what I love about the identity based, and it's a different idea, is I get to choose which identity I'm (unclear) in those moments. I don't have to pick them, because I do think sometimes in our work, we're back to the melting pot concept, where we're like, “Let's just be all happy and get along.” And we really don't create that space for the uniqueness of our identities to come forward. So what I love about where (CSU) San Marcos is now is honestly, yeah. They were willing to open centers for like, when I was there. There's two other centers popping up, right? You know, what I, what I think is interesting is you have the National Latino Resource Center. And you have the Latino Resource Center (Latin /X Center), and you have the Dreamers Center. And my question is, how are all of them partnering and working together? And are we creating living learning spaces? Because I will tell you, I don't think you need separate spaces just for belonging. What we need are spaces that allow a student to live and to learn. And often the connection to academic, their academics is critically important. Does that make sense? Like, I will tell you, I do a lot of work around basic needs. This is not a popular statement that I'm about to make, but everything we do for students' basic needs should be connected to them moving forward to achieve their educational goals. Period. If we're not helping a student progress forward or persist, the reality (is) we're not a social service agency. That is not our area of expertise. What we are is, as I see Jennifer as a student, Jennifer has needs, some of them are more immediate, some are more long-term. So, Jennifer, how can I help connect you for your immediate, basic needs, to a community organization? Cal-fresh. Housing. That can help you so that I'm not, I'm, I'm helping you to fish. Not just trying to fix this need right now. Because oftentimes people will say, “Well, Jennifer can't go to school because she has so many life things.” And I'm like, yeah, but the reality is we have to balance, how do we supply the needs? So Jennifer, 'cause that's, that's social mobility for a student. That's what's gonna change a life. That's what, that's what we want. We wanna change our life through helping Jennifer get their degree. Ho: Yeah. Perez: Am I preaching to you? But that's what, to me, the crux of what we're doing is, I think every campus is gonna be different, quite honestly. And I think (CSU) San Marcos has found its niche, right? I think when it moved all the identity-based centers into a unit. So that they can collaborate, coordinate, partner. I think it's fabulous. Ho: So do you see do you see a trend with college campuses overall moving from multicultural centers to, to these focused, identity-based? Perez: So I've changed and morphed a little bit too. And I will tell you that it's funny. My, my vision is similar, but different. And I think that's from being at (CSU) San Marcos, but also having the identity-based spaces conversation at MiraCosta Community College, and then Cerritos College, and then now in the system. I would tell you my ideal, which is not new to me. Does that make sense? It's just the model, model that I love, is where you have this cross-- and this kind of was where we had started, but it never got there. Cross-Cultural is the hub, right? But then you would have physical spaces because symbolism matters to identities. But you would have some spaces connected. So you could have your LGBTQIA, you could have Gender Equity, you could have, you know, I'm trying to—Black--you know, all the different centers that aren't necessarily disconnected. The hub is the cross-cultural part. So (California State University) Fullerton, to my understanding, has this model where they have a coordinator for each, but they're all interconnected in their work and in the way they do this. That to me is the ideal quite honestly. I don't think having separate spaces across campuses, across whatever are the ideal. I think having them where there could be a synergy together. I think (CSU) San Marcos is close, right? Because most of them are in the (University Student) Union. They've done a really good job of trying to put everything in the Union. Some are a few out, you know, I used to serve on the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center’s taskforce. And then, you know, I just learned they're working to do a Native Center. And I was like, but you have two, like two spaces, like two, like what's the difference? So, you know, I don't know where it starts or stops. I just think that each campus has to have its hand on the pulse of what their students need. And I think engaging faculty in these spaces matters. You know, that is one of the most critical relationships. Is I've talked about my experiences. You know, it could be a staff member. Absolutely. But your faculty relationships matter. Ho: Yeah. When you were, when you were starting out as this, as the Associate--Associate Director-- (Both talking) Perez: Director-- Ho: --of Multicultural Spaces, is that correct? Perez: Multicultural Programs. (Both talking) Ho: Multicultural Programs. Perez: Um-huh. Ho: Okay. Thank you. You said you spoke to different people on campus. Did that include students and faculty as well? Perez: Yeah. You know, it--my world was so blended. So the, the, the thing that's a little different at (CSU) San Marcos--so when I left San Marcos in 2016, I would tell you and I give all credit, Lorena, Mesa, and Checka at the time, they threw a phenomenal party. I would tell you mostly faculty were there, right? So the way in which I navigated the campus was really fluid between Student Affairs and Academic Affairs. Ho: Um-hmm. Perez: Yes. I mean, I would tell you, like, can I remember? I--I think I met with Gary Rollinson. I think I remember meeting with advisors. I think students, I don't have the list, obviously. It was 19 years ago. Which is crazy. But yeah, I mean, I think we, we just were more fluid between the organization back then that, yeah, I remember meeting with as many people that would meet with me. Ho: That's great. And did that include students as well? Perez: Yes. But I can't tell you the exact names of the students. Yes. Ho: Oh, that's okay. That's fine. One of my questions on my list here is what did the students say that they wanted? Perez: Yeah. Yeah. I think what's hard for me is what a student would say today and what a student would say in 2004 are very different things. So I think we're, we are more knowledgeable about DEIJ language. And about--I hate to say it this way, but the hatred, the discrimination, the oppression that's in the world. And I think that at the point when we started our work around DEI was still kind of in the--I I hate to say it, in the happy phase. So you know how I said the Latino Center--resource center was built out of crisis, right? And the Black Resource Center, I think a crisis. Veterans Center, not so much. I think it was us being strategic and the community. But the Cross-Cultural Center wasn't built out of a crisis. It was built out of an opportunity to strengthen the student experience and to create a resource for students. So I would say to you that I think students at that point were wanting a sense of community. Does that make sense? Wanting a pla-- a space. So space, which we gave. They wanted the celebratory aspects. Like we talked about the Powwow, and I don't know if the powwow has come back to San Marcos. It was huge, the Powwow, huge, huge! It took months to plan those things. So I went in as the University Liaison to the groups to help them plan that. Gala GATSA for the Oaxacan community. I was on the Gala GATSA community. I remember sitting in the back and, and I think this is me and Cross-Cultural Center, literally (laughs). I had never been to a Gala GATSA before. It was five thousand people! Do you hear me? Five thousand. We, this was, these were huge community events. I was sitting in the back next to and Humberto Garcia, (Jr.). I don't know if he's still there in risk managing--manager. Girl, they threw whole pineapples and cantaloupes through the audience. I'm literally standing there and I was like, is that, is that a whole pineapple? That's a tradition in the, like, in that, you know. But so for us, I think it was more of just really being there to support students. It wasn't until I became a dean, quite honestly, and I got into to the associate director (position) that I started tackling some of those more difficult, sensitive--it was probably director on that, that I was in those conversations that were tackling some of the discrimination that was happening on campuses. You know, there were many conversations where faculty members were saying and doing things that they shouldn't be saying or doing that I as a dean or you know, would say, you can't, that's, you can't do that (laughs). Like, no. We had a faculty member that were, they were very upset about students and their perception of, and they tried to kick students out of the class. And you know, I went in and the faculty member literally when I went in and said, “What the f are you doing here?” And I was like, “You have a right to an advocate and so do students. And so I'm here as a student advocate.” And so we had the conversation and that faculty member said, “You're wasting my effing time.” And just so you're, you're taught if I'm dealing with this! If, if I'm dealing with this as an administrator, and, and mind you, that person was a person of color that said this, it was not, you know, so I--I don't want to send the wrong, it was a person of color. That, you know, and there's a, a story that I've told, and I'll, I know it's seven (o’clock), but I, there's a story that I, I've told publicly. So I started the, it was the Celebration of Culture. 'Cause we used to do it a lot. The Celebration of Culture in the beginning. And so it was, I think an acknowledgement and recognition, of the work that was being done on the campuses. And I was--we had a first Amendment issue that happened when I was an administrator. And we had a controversial speaker that was on campus that was very discriminatory. And we called a meeting and we had a conversation. And in this meeting were a whole bunch of administrators. And someone was giving examples and they said, well, Dilcie, if you--someone called you the N word--and used the word--we wouldn't, you know, this is what would happen or whatever. And then they went to, if someone called you a whore. And then they went to me. And I didn't realize how upset I was getting in this meeting. And the person that was sitting next to me put their hand on my lap and stop me, just help stop me from shaking. And they said, “Can we stop using Dilcie as the example?” And the person said, “I didn't know if Dilcie was Black. I thought she was a hot-headed Puerto Rican.” And mind you, I was an administrator on the campus. Administrator on campus. And finally someone had enough sense to say, “We need to end this meeting.” So we all went our separate ways. And the next morning went in the meeting and I just, I just, I, I was so upset . So, so, so upset. And so they said, you know, we're gonna have this person, you know, apologize, whatever. And so the person came and gave me a half-baked apology. And so a year, a couple years went by. And they came and asked me to do the keynote for, it was, it must have been Celebration of Culture or something at the time. I can't remember. And I decided that one, I would never share who the person was 'cause that wasn't important, but that we were gonna tell the story. And so publicly, in front of 250 people, Executive Council, we did a split screen. And so the person who served as my ally in that moment, and me had a screen between us and we told the story of what happened that day. And with the point of, you never know when you're gonna need an ally. And you never know, even as an administrator, if it can happen to an administrator, it can happen to a student. And so, (CSU) San Marcos, we say that we're inclusive and that we value these things? We need to, we need to be serious about it. Right? And so at the end of the speech, the room did not move, Jennifer. It was silent. And I thought, oh no, I've lost my job. Like I, it is not good. And all of a sudden it broke out into applause and the room stood up and everybody was so happy. And I received so much support, quite honestly, for that. And the president called me, she said, “Is there anything I need to do?” And I was like, “No.” Like, “I just needed you to hear, there's nothing, thank you. Nothing.” And so a few years later they said, “Dilcie, we're gonna have to put you on a team with this person.” And I was like, “No buddy, no, you're not.” And they said, “Yeah, like, we have no choice.” And I said, “Let them say one dumb thing. I'm telling you I'm not putting up with it. I'm not mess--like one dumb thing.” And this person, and I served on this team together for about a year and a half, two years. And about after a year of us working together, we were sitting in my office on a, working on a tough case. And they said, “I just want to truly, truly apologize for what happened. I'm sorry. I was ignorant. I didn't know any better. I know better now. I'm very sorry.” To that point, that individual and I are exceptionally close to this day. I have been to their home, have been to events at their house. He knows not to say those dumb things anymore. But he, there is, there is--there is restoration in some of those things. There is forgiveness, there is learning, there is growth. Does that make sense? And so I share that very long story to say that when I think about (CSU) San Marcos is at the core of, no matter what happens at the Cross-Cultural Center, at the identity based cen--it's relation, it is about relationships. When students were picketing over, some things happened at the campus. The president had the reports to the community. And I went out and I was on the picket line with the students. And someone got back to me that someone said, “I don't like Dilcie. 'Cause she's out there picketing with the students.” No, I wasn't, I was making sure the students had their right to use their voice and that it didn't impact the event, but they had a right to be there. And so let's do that in a way that's supportive of them. Right? When the abortion people came, they may still come with the big signs. (Perez holds hands up over her head) We sat down and had a team and said, “Here's the deal. You're gonna have protestors. Let's manage it accordingly.” I remember putting blue tape right down the middle and said, “Here's the space (laughs), and here's your space. Have at it be respectful.” Be--and I walked down and supported both sides as they did those things. Because I think to me while -- and I think a lot of people on the campus believe this -- while we want to be protected from hateful language, the reality of this is the world that we live in. And what we have to do is create a space where all voices can be heard. Ho: Uh-huh. Perez: And you have a right to safety. You absolutely do, but you don't have a right to be unoffended. Because I will tell you that in the first days of (CSU) San Marcos, there were all kinds of speakers that came that I didn't necessarily agree with. But what I loved is being exposed to ideas that were different than mine that helped to validate. Or invalidate my thought process that made me think about what I believed and didn't believe. That to me is the essence of higher education. That's where I think a Cross-Cultural Center, it's not that you say everything that's popular or bring one side and one belief. You have to be balanced. Ho: Thank you so much for sharing those stories and those memories. They really provide context to what the campus was. And a lot of it is behind the scenes that people wouldn't know, wouldn't expect. Especially students going about their day to day. So thank you for doing that. (both talking) Perez: That's right. There is, I mean, I think they can't, that (CSU) San Marcos is not a perfect place. But what I will say to you is I have, I have the opportunity to view all twenty-three (CSU campuses) now, and I’m oh so appreciative of the DEIJ, the Cross-Cultural Center, the work that's happening at San Marcos in this area. Yeah. Ho: You've mentioned some names of people that you've worked with, people you appreciate, are there, who are some more people that were really important to the Cross-Cultural Center that we might not know about? Perez: I--if you haven't talked to Jonathan Pollard, I think you should find him. He was the Dean of Students at the time who, who really said we're gonna make this happen. And he was part of that with Bridget (Blanshan) that did the 2010. And I think he had the original vision for it. So I would, I think he is part of that. I think, you're gonna ask me and I--Janet Perez-Covacevich, I have to think she was the first student assistant in that space. Ho: Hey, I was gonna ask you about your, that student assistant. Perez: Janet Perez. First, and let me give you her number 'cause I know it by heart from even back then. Ho: Okay. Let's do that via email. Okay. And not on this recording. Yeah. (both talking) Perez: Sure. So I can share that with you. And then Sida Munoz, I, she was in the center. She works at (CSU) San Marcos now. She was in the center in the very beginning a lot. I think sleeping and having space, but she partnered and volunteered a lot. We also added the Cross-Cultural Center and Multicultural Programs did the very first alternative spring break for the campus. So that was part of the work that we did that first year where we took students to San Francisco to the Glide to do work in the community. So that's a little tangential, that was more from the Multicultural programs. But it, all of that was flowing out of that space for sure. Ho: Thank you. Perez: You probably have most everybody else 'cause you have all the directors and everyone that worked there, right? Ho: Yeah. Floyd's reached out to--Floyd reached out to a lot of people. So we have-- Perez: Yeah-- (both talking) Ho: --A lot of folks responding. Perez: Yeah, yeah. Totally. Ho: Including himself. Yeah. (both laugh) Perez: As he, as he should, he's done a marvelous job. Very proud. (both talking) Ho: Yeah. He really has. Perez: Yeah. Ho: I--how are we doing on time? Perez: I probably could give you a few more minutes and then yeah, head out. Are you clo-- are you good or do you have more? Ho: Yeah, I really would like to know a little bit more about you mentioned this concept of the third space. Could you tell me more about that in general or, and or as it relates to CSUSM? Perez: Sure. So during, you know, as folks try and figure out what they're studying and researching, I was exposed and I came, can't even tell you how to, a concept by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture that talks about when an individual transitions from one culture to the next, what they do is they take the unique strengths and characteristics of each of those cultures. So take the greatness, the goodness, and then make a third space out of it. And so my work is around breaking down the organizational silos between Academic Affairs and Student Affairs, particularly with the research. But I will say to you that I think that spaces like the Cross-Cultural Center, like identity-based centers are examples of third spaces where you take the unique strengths of faculty and Academic Affairs and the unique strengths of Student Affairs, and you put 'em together. And so the spaces could be, you know could be literally or figuratively. And so for me, as you think about the center space, these are, these should be third spaces where we blend both the best of both worlds. So that's the way in which I approach the work in my daily work, quite honestly, is that students don't care about our organizational silos. They really don't. And so how can we create more seamless, holistic experiences for students? Ho: Um-hmm. Thank you. Perez: Yeah. Ho: Could you tell us what you, what you do now at-- Perez: In my current role? Ho: In your current role? Yes. (Perez laughs) Perez: So--so I left (California State University) San Marcos in 2016. I went to be the Dean of Student Life and Judicial Affairs at MiraCosta (Community College). So I was there two years. And then with my boss, who's amazing at the time, thought that I should consider being a vice president of student services. And so I left MiraCosta after two years and became the VP of Student Services and Associate Superintendent at Cerritos College. And so I was there almost four years. And then someone approached me about this job, which is, which was the Associate Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, Equity and Belonging in the CSU. Right? So really my work now is to bring--is, well, it's hard, but. So I work with all the diversity officers in the system. So I love that, quite honestly, on the system. And so it's been helpful because I have experience doing some of that work and so helpful to highlight the wonderful and important work that they're doing. But my role changed. So I--I am almost been here a year, but I was promoted to Deputy Vice Chancellor of Academic and Student Affairs. And so that was May 1st, but I will be the acting co-executive vice chancellor for the system for all of academic and student affairs. I know it's hard to keep up with. It's we, but it's movement. And so this position will, will really work with the presidents, provosts, and vice presidents. And the funny part is that Nathan Evans, I don't know if you know that name, he is a co-deputy, but he worked with me at San Marcos. So we started our relationship there. And so people, the chancellor has seen how well we work together, and so we both were promoted to co-lead the division. Ho: That's wonderful. Well, congratulations on your, on your promotion. Perez: Thank you. It's a lot to take in. I, it's, I'm very humbled by it. But it's a, it's a big gig, so. Ho: Yeah. Perez: Yeah. Ho: Cool. I guess we could start wrapping up. Are there any memories or stories or anything that you'd like to share from your CSUSM days? Perez: No, I think I've shared a lot of wonderful memories. I mean, I think of--despite challenges, there really were some pivotal moments that framed me as personally and professionally. When you asked about it, I remember we were trying to beautify the center and Jay Franklin, I think was serving as an interim during that time. And we did a mural and I don't know if you know about the mural, but we came on a Saturday and it was a community mural. And it's so funny because the mural was hanging in the Cross-Cultural Center for years, and finally we were like, it's time to get rid of it. I was like, just let it go. And Floyd would not. And so it's hanging in the College of Humanities, Arts and Behavioral Sciences. The first Cross-Cultural (Center) mural is in that conference room. He had it moved there. And so I, I love that the campus is, I'm telling you, there were no obstacles. And I think that I will tell you that while I know that everyone is not for DEIJ work, that everyone at San Marcos is not for it, I do think that we have tried to address challenges and obstacles in a collaborative, supportive way to start. But I do think that as, as the work continues kind of the way in which we started the rah rah and the hooray, we can't remember, we can't forget, the essence of the work is really in addressing the social injustices that unfortunately have infiltrated their way onto our college campuses. That to me is the essence of the work: is we should be building students up and not tearing them down. We should be beacons of light and hope for societies that are uninterested in confronting the social injustices that have significantly, disproportionately impacted many marginalized populations. That should not be okay. That should not be okay. That if we are telling a student, we want you to come here, we need to do everything that we can to help them be successful. Ho: Thank you. Perez: Yes. Ho: That was beautifully said and I appreciate it. I also want to come back to that mural. Could you, in case nobody else in their interviews have talked about it, could you give me a little bit of info on it just so we have it for the record? Perez: Yeah. So it is interesting. The mural we knew we needed, so somebody else in another department, and I think it may have been CAMP (College Assistance Migrant Program), had brought an artist to the campus and talked to us about them doing this mural. For their, for their program. So Jay (Franklin) and I and Dick said, “We wanna do that.” So we paid to have the artists come. And it was a Saturday, and I think it was in U(niversity) Hall, outside U Hall 100. We all were there. And he takes you through this process of where you're thinking about community, thinking about what you want, and then you each had like a sliver of the panel that you did. And I can't remember if he, he must have drawn an outline, I'm guessing, if I remember correctly. And if you see it, there's so many vibrant colors, so many vibrant colors. And I actually think we need to pull it and take pictures and document even more. Floyd probably has access to 'em because I can see, I just remember when I would walk around the room and see what people put, you were like, oh! And look at you (laughs). Right? But it represented the sense of community that was involved with the creation of the space. You have to remember, Cross-Cultural Center was there before any of the other centers. Ho: Yeah. Perez: It was the first, unless maybe not, maybe, and we have to confirm, National Latino Research Center may have been around. As a research institute base. But Cross-cultural Center, before all the centers, there was a Cross-Cultural Center that set the foundation for those to come. Ho: Um-hmm. Perez: So I would say to you that when you look at it, you'll see just the, the diversity, the tapestry of our community at the time. There's so many things in that mural. So you should go see it. So many things in that mural. Ho: Okay, thank you. (both talking) Perez: I haven't seen it in a few years, but definitely check the mural. 'Cause that we did that probably, maybe I came back in 2006, so maybe 2007, 2008. So that was about four years after we opened. So we're celebrating twenty years (of the CCC being open), right? I'm trying to think, is coming up. So we're, I came to the fifteen, I think he's (Floyd Lai) getting to twenty, so it's, so March, they should count March as kind of the opening, I'm guessing. Ho: Yeah, I think it is March. Perez: It was 2004. He's right, it was March 2004 when I started it. Yeah. Ho: Okay. Perez: So I think that that, that, that mural was really a great you know, I'm, I saw Chanel Bradley and um Gerardo Cabral, he, I'm sure some of the other folks, they're on Facebook and saw them. Diana Sal--Saldivar. I mean these were like the OGs of, and you know what I will tell you is I think that then for a while, students came and went like they were good and pivotal, right? But it was different when you were in the beginning. But I see Floyd recently 'cause I'm still on Facebook with some, and it's like, looks like they have a strong sense of community amongst the, the peer educators. And Floyd brought the interns. And so that has made the difference too especially with resources. I do remember as a director advocating for that space though. You know, I'm pretty proud of how we set that space up. There, there was a lot of political navigation in that and took, you know, a lot of collateral and 'cause you know, there people were vying for space, right? But we had a reputation. And in the negotiations, you see we did pretty good. We gave up some of the physical space on the inside to get the patio on the outside (laughs) like when you think there was a lot of strategy in, in the space and how we navigated those pieces. You gotta remember too – now you're bringing up all these memories for me – the, the Multicultural Programs was started with a lottery grant. Lottery. Ho: (unclear) mean? Perez: So lottery funds, we had to apply for lottery funds. And they were only supposed to be for like two to three years to get you started. So we had to write a lottery application to get it started, to get, to have funding, to have any programming money. Ho: Oh my goodness. I did not know that. Perez: And then I started making some interesting deals across campus to get other funds. Some we probably don't wanna record, but it got access to, to some, you know. And then, oh, and then before I left, I--oh, I forgot about this! So do you, do they still have co-curricular funds? The pro-- you can apply for co-curricular funds? Ho: I think so. Perez: I worked that deal. And so I had told Bridget (Blanshan), I was like, “We need to stop everybody from going all over getting funds. We need to get the funds.” And so by the time I came back, they had co-- Bridget had co-curricular funds. And so we had this process for co-curricular funds. And then Tukwut Life. This is outside. So in Tukwut Life, this, I did a deal with the president's office on Tukwut Life. 'Cause The president's husband came to me and said, “You need to start some campus traditions.” And so Tukwut Life was part of that. Ho: How did you, did you create Tukwut Life? Was that an original-- Perez: With a whole bunch of people. We sure did. Absolutely. Tukwut Life. (both talking) Ho: That's awesome. Perez: We sure did. And I think it's died down a little bit since then, but oh, it was a whole movement. Oh. Ho: What was it? What was Tukwut Life? Perez: It was Friday night and weekend programming so that to make sure that we had night and weekend programs for students because we were increasing the number of residents and we didn't have a lot of community at the time, right? And so we knew we needed some community. Athletics was coming on board in a greater way than it was. And so, and so this is all, this is tangential to the Cross-Cultural Center. I don't know who I thought I was. I really don't. I think I just didn't ask permission. And we were just a different campus then. I don't know. I was telling someone the other day, I--I'm sure we had policies and procedures. I know we did. But I literally, one day when I was trying to create tradition on, you know, Tukwut Courtyard--I, you know, those stickers on the window, I was the first one to put all those stickers on the window. You know how it has the, oh. And then I plastered the stairs with, with CSU Gear. I had a professional company come out. I don't know who I asked. Like I was trying to think like, “Did you ask anyone? Like who told you you could do?” No, I was gonna create Tukwut Courtyard as a spirit courtyard. I, we held a pep rally there. But literally I had stairs and, you know, we used to get, I get real happiness, students would come take pictures at commencement time with their family around those, those pictures, yeah. Ho: Um-Hm. Perez: And, but then I couldn't put the stickers up anymore 'cause the concrete's old. So then we had to get rid of them, so we couldn't do that anymore. So then I had to go think about something else. Um-hmm. I don't know who I thought I was. I just need you to know. I like, now everything's so bureaucratic, right? No. We just did stuff, we did what we needed to do. Ho: Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you just have to not think about it and just do it. Perez: And I, the campus was gracious to me. I also wasn't doing dumb stuff. Right. I was doing things that, but I don't know where I—all of a sudden woke up one day and I was like, I couldn't, I'm hiring a company, put some stickers on some stairs. Ho: Yeah. (inaudible) Perez: But I think that with the Cross-Cultural Center, why it worked, is that I didn't have to always ask permission. I did--I knew what I was advocating for and the campus was gracious enough to entertain that. And I think I had enough credibility at that point that they trusted me. Ho: Yeah. I think so. Perez: I don't think everything's perfect. I probably could have documented stuff better. Literally like when I look at what Alexis did and you, I was like, I was, I was just doing the rah rah fun part. Getting it started. The sustaining it is the hard part, right? So I know what I've learned about myself as a professional. I'm great at starting things like I can get a vision going. Like Cross-Cultural Center that changed and redefined--I would not be here today had it not been for the work in Multicultural Programs (inaudible). I would not, it changed--that one decision to join that team changed the trajectory of my life and my career. Ho: That's really cool. Perez: I'm, I'm pretty grateful. Pretty, I am proud of the Cross-Culture Center. I'm proud of the way Floyd (Lai) has led it. I'm proud and I'm not trying to be funny. I'm proud it has stayed controversy free (laughs). I think it has done important work in really kind, meaningful relational ways. Floyd's out there doing DEIJ work, he just does it differently than someone that's out there yelling and screaming. His work that he's doing in that center, you look at what that center has done – as you are (laughs) – for the campus. He, he has that--each of the directors, I think has added and put their nuance and their flair on that center. And I'm internally grateful that 20 years later I am proud to be connected and associated with such great work. Ho: It really does feel like a center of, of love and acceptance. It's really a beautiful, a really beautiful place. And you can, you can see that from anybody that you, you talk to. They all love the Cross-Cultural Center. Perez: It is. And it really is. And he has just furthered that vision. Like we started with that. But the population, like you have to think, we only had, I don't know when I left, I don't even know, maybe 7,000 students at that, at the time when I left, you know, once. And then came back and we grew like in, you know, seven years to 15,000. That's, that center has stayed tried and true. Tried and true. So what that tells me is I, yeah, we set a great foundation but the folks that came thereafter have really done a magnificent job and created a legacy for that case. Sara Sheik, I think about what she added, you know, that's where the Social Justice Summit was started. We were all there. I don't know if they told you. We were sitting there and we felt like people were too much in their heads. Oh, they were just, they, it was outside of them. Outside of them. And we were like, no, no, no. I remember sitting on the swing there and we were like, we gotta do something. So then we created the exercise madder than Hell. Mad as Hell. And we wanted to get them to their hearts. And we did that exercise Mad as Hell. Scott Gross. Scott Gross and I started, Sara Sheikh came in, we created that Mad as Hell exercise. They're probably still not doing it 'cause it seemed like we had controversy at every Social Justice Summit. But we were doing that work with students. And honestly, I went through a training not too long ago and they were doing equity work and I was like, “Uh, we were doing this with students, like first-year students in 2005. And you're literally taking people through this right now? This is outdated work. What are talking about?” Then I think about the students at San Marcos? They were getting that in their first year. You tell me how much different and how transformative that would be for them coming out their senior year. Ho: Yeah. Perez: I'm inspired and moved. Ho: That's great. That's so awesome. Perez: You just made me excited about the Cross-Cultural Center even more. Ho: Wait, say that again? Perez: I said, “You just made me so excited about the Cross-Cultural Center.” Ho: I, I'm really happy and I feel like I'm supposed to wrap up this interview, but I'm afraid that you'll think of more great memories to share and things to say. I don't wanna cut us off. Perez: Yeah. Well here's the thing. I will let you know if some things come up that I think are important, I'll reach out to you and let you know. 'Cause I--I'm, I am so grateful that you all are doing this. I think it is a really critical part of San Marcos and its history. Not just as a center, but in DEIJ work. For sure. Ho: Absolutely. Yeah. And the stories from people who were there, who started these movements and experienced them and made them happen are really important. 'Cause they're not always documented on paper. Perez: Yeah. I didn't do that very well. And I'm sure others, (Ho laughs) we were, we were hustling. We were hustling for sure. Right. So, but we did it. Ho: That's great. Yeah. And we have the proof of it now, celebrating the anniversary coming up. Perez: That’s exciting. I'm excited for you. So, well, it's nice to meet you. I hope that we, I just did an official visit there a few months ago, but hope we have the chance to meet in person. Ho: I hope so too! Thank you Dr. Perez. I will go ahead and end the interview now. Perez: Wonderful. https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en video Property rights reside with the university. Copyrights are retained by the creators of the records and their heirs. &#13 ; &#13 ; This resource is licensed for noncommercial educational use using CC NC-BY 4.0. Please contact Special Collections at archives csusm.edu if you need reproductions made. &#13 ; &#13 ; Please see the related “Preferred Citation note” for language on citing materials from this collection. &#13 ; &#13 ; Permission to examine Library materials is not authorization to publish or to reproduce the examined material in whole, or in part. Persons wishing to quote, publish, perform, reproduce, or otherwise make use of an item in the Library’s collections must assume all responsibility for identifying and satisfying any claimants of the copyright holder. &#13 ; &#13 ; The researcher assumes full responsibility for use of the material and agrees to hold harmless the University Library, and California State University, against all claims, demands, costs, and expenses incurred by copyright infringement or any other legal or regulatory cause of action arising from the use of the Library's materials. &#13 ; &#13 ; In assuming full responsibility for use of the material, the researcher also understands that the materials they examine may contain Social Security numbers, other personal identifiers, and/or sensitive material on potentially living and identifiable individuals (e.g., medical, evaluative, or personally invasive information). The researcher agrees not to record, reproduce, or disclose any Social Security number or other information of a highly personal nature that may be found. 0 https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PerezDilcie_HoJennifer_2023-05-30.xml PerezDilcie_HoJennifer_2023-05-30.xml https://archivesearch.csusm.edu/repositories/3/resources/19 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Perez, Dilcie. Interview May 30, 2023. Description An account of the resource Dr. Dilcie Perez is Deputy Vice Chancellor, Academic and Student Affairs for the CSU, as well as a California State University San Marcos (CSUSM) alumna. She graduated with her degree in Bachelors of Arts in Political Science. In this interview, Perez explains how CSUSM was ahead of its time in regards to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) work; however at the beginning of her employment with CSUSM, the university did not have Multicultural Programs (the predecessor to the Cross-Cultural Center). Perez recalls her work with Multicultural Programs, including her being offered the opportunity to open the program upon tendering her resignation to the university. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SC027-43 Subject The topic of the resource California State University San Marcos. Cross-Cultural Center California State University. Multicultural Programs California State University San Marcos. Student Academic Services Outreach Program California State University San Marcos. Student Affirmative Action Education, Higher Human rights Mural painting and decoration Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023-05-30 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dilcie Perez Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Ho Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant San Marcos (Calif.) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Language A language of the resource English Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Dilcie Perez Cross-Cultural Center oral history project CSUSM history Latine experience Women's experience https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/files/original/e4b63f52f64e75d6b2babf4b5ae15f82.pdf ba62a9bcaeab7b7107074cfb0e2ab846 PDF Text Text Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Jennifer Ho: Okay. Today is May 30th, 2023. My name is Jennifer Ho, and I am interviewing Dr. Dilcie Perez for the CSUSM (California State University San Marcos) Cross-Cultural Center (CCC) Oral History Project. Thank you so much for being with me today, Dr. Perez. How are you? Dilcie Perez: Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity. Ho: Great. Okay, so I just wanted to start with a little bit about you personally. Can you tell me where you're from? Perez: No (both laugh). So I grew up in a military family, so I had the wonderful opportunity to live in places like Arizona and Maine and California, and Okinawa and traveled around and graduated high school in Okinawa, Japan. And moved to California as--in the nineties, early nineties. And had started, when I graduated high school in Japan, I wasn't sure where I wanted to go to college. And so I kind of took a lot of classes at community colleges. And when I moved to California someone said to me, “Have you ever heard of a place called Cal(ifornia) State San Marcos?” And at that time, I had not. And so they said, “Oh, they have programs at the time for juniors and seniors, and so you should check them out.” And so I applied to go to school at San Marcos and was accepted. And so I can talk about that later, obviously. But I, my, I come from a family of--I have my parents and I have two brothers, and I am the only girl and the youngest. However, I was also adopted, and so found my biological family later in life. And so in that family, I am the oldest of three girls. And so, have a wonderfully blended family. My education, I graduated from Cal State San Marcos in (19)94-ish. And I say that because I had the wonderful opportunity to speak at commencement in (19)94 as the speaker, one of the student speakers. And, and I think my speech might, I don't know if it's in the archives, but there's gotta be some video or something of all the, the different commencements. But moved immediately after that to North Carolina and had two classes to finish. And so I was also pregnant at the time, and so it took me about a year to get those two classes done. So I walked in (19)94, but my, my diploma says (19)95. And came back to San Marcos and then went and got my master's at Central Michigan. So they have--they had a military on-base education. And so they would fly out the instructors from Central Michigan to do an executive master's program. And this is back in the early 2000s. So this was years ago. And then I waited thirteen years to go back and get my doctorate from San Diego State in educational leadership with the emphasis in community college. Ho: Thank you. Can I ask you what brought you out to California in the first place? Perez: Yeah, the military. So I met my ex-husband in Okinawa, and then we moved to North Carolina, and then he received orders to Camp Pendleton. And so we lived in Oceanside actually at that time, and then I went to school. Ho: Okay. Okay. That's great. What were your impressions of--of California, of San Diego, of Oceanside when you, when you arrived for the first time? Perez: Yeah, I don't think that I had anything particularly of California. Because I traveled the world. And so it was another place. I remember living in--off of Mission Avenue and just appreciating being close to the beach and the weather. And but I will tell you this, that I came, so when this was (19)91-ish. And when someone referenced, like to go to Cal State San Marcos, and I say this, I tell the story all the time: Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 1 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 that when I applied to Cal State San Marcos, got accepted, I went to orientation. And orientation at that time in 1992 was at Cal State Jerome's. So you've probably heard the stories across the street. Ho: Yep. Perez: And I can see it. One, I will tell you, I still have my 1992 orientation binder that I received when I came. Still. So I've traveled and moved. But I recently was, you know, consolidating. I was like, “No, I'm keeping this, like this is good, important stuff in 1992.” And I will tell you that what is pivotal for me of having been in a military family traveling the world, that I remember walking out of orientation feeling like it was a place that I belonged because of the message of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And, you know, in (19)92, we didn't always use those words. Ho: Right. Perez: But, but diversity was a value for the campus from the start. And I remember people, someone at orientation saying, “We don't want to be a melting pot. That's old, outdated language.” And this was in (19)92, right? “Because a melting pot blends everyone together, and you can't tell the difference. We wanna be a salad bowl and we want everyone to have a unique.” And so that resonated with me that I felt like I found a place, even at my orientation in 1992 at Cal State San Marcos. Ho: Wow, that's, that's amazing. That's really great to hear. So is that--just to fast forward a little bit, is that what brought you back to CSUSM? Perez: That's interesting. So literally when I worked in as a student, I worked in what was at the time Student Affirmative Action. So they called it SAA. Someone by the name of Denise Hollis became a mentor. I think Eric Cardoso or folks in Student Affirmative Action (Program). And this was obviously before Prop 209. That then started to abolish offices such as that, right? And so when I worked in those areas and SASOP (Student Academic Services Outreach Program) and stuff, I was a student going out and doing motivational outreach. So we would do programs in schools, and I was going out doing that, and I had such a powerful experience as a student. And I moved to North Carolina right after I graduated for a year and a half, two years. And when I came back, I was at a party, like a barbecue, I can't remember. And someone said to me, “Hey, you know I got a new job.” It was somebody that I worked for. She said, “I got a new job.” And I was like, “Ah, I want your job.” Like, “I want your job.” And she just started laughing. She was like, “Ha.” I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no. I really want your job.” Like, “What do I need to do?” And her assignment was temporary. And so this was--so really why I came back to work was because there was a temporary opportunity. It was an Assistant Outreach Coordinator in Student Academic Services Outreach Program. And so I started back at the campus that I love so much, and really in official capacity doing what I had done as a student. Ho: That's wonderful. And was that after you got your, your doctorate from SDSU? Perez: No. So this is all in 1998, (19)90. So I graduated in (19)95. I was in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And then I came back, I think in (19)97 and worked for GEICO, did temp work. I was like, “What's my life's purpose? Where am I headed? What am I doing?” And then I met her at this party or saw her again Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 2 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 at this party. And then the rest is history about (CSU) San Marcos, because I left, there's a lot to the story. But I left, but stayed for a long time and really had a great professional experience. Ho: That's wonderful. Do you remember the name of the person from the party? Perez: Oh, Mary Wardell. Um-hmm. Ho: Mary Wardell. Perez: Yeah. She was, she worked in Student Affirmative Action, and she moved and went to the Dean of Students' Office, was an Assistant Dean of Students. And that's when I saw her. 'Cause she had just received that pro-- promotion. Now she works at--she moved to, I think, University of the Pacific, but she does DEI work, she’s done written books and done amazing things in this area. Yeah. Ho: Thank you. Perez: Yeah. Ho: So now backtracking again. I wanna hear about your time as a student, because obviously it had a profound impact on you. So, so did it meet--did being a student meet your expectations after that orientation? And can you tell me about some experiences on campus and the people that you met and some pivotal moments? Perez: Oh, I love it! So I will tell you that I (laughs)--I, I had a fun experience at (California State) San Marcos, but I wasn't your traditional student. Like, I didn't know what a Dean of Students was. I didn't know about higher education. I knew that I had gone, I didn't learn this until later. I'd gone to like six different community colleges picking up classes. I spent time at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, picking up classes. So I was going to school constantly, but picking up classes as we traveled. And so when I got to, you know, (CSU) San Marcos, it--you have to remember the culture was so different because it was so small and the faculty and the students were so tight. And when I arrived, there were no first year students. It was only juniors and seniors. And we only had three buildings. So Science Hall, Academic Hall, and maybe well, Administration Building, Craven, which is not Craven anymore. So it was those three buildings. And I will say to you that I was married, right? And so I was working during the day, I was going to school, and I took classes. I will tell you, that's really profound. And to this point, I'm still connected to these faculty members today. Leslie Zomalt. So, you know, the (Ernest and Leslie) Zomalt Award they're very, I'm very close to them. She was my faculty member in California History and we're still close. And she gave me a B! Like a B, a B. So I was like, “Why do I like you so much? You gave me a B.” But she was so good because she would, what I loved about her--I was going through a personal, difficult personal situation during that time, and I must have missed class or something must have happened that, she called me and she said, “I realize that you're not around. I wanna check on you and see how you're doing.” And that was pivotal to me. I remember that she went to a conference and she loves to read. She still loves to--I, I'm going to her house for quilting. She got me connected to quilting. I hate quilting. I hate it. I hate it. But I love you know, I, when I came back one time, I said to her, “Will you make me a quilt?” Is what I said to her. Literally this bold. And she said, “I will not make you a quilt. I will teach you how to quilt.” And I was like, “Ah, okay.” So, but every year, for about ten to fifteen years, we have quilted at her house for a year, for at one time a year. Now, I don't Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 3 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 quilt any other time. I still hate quilting. But I love the sense of community and the mentorship and the love that goes into it, that I literally will quilt one thing within my range once a year when I go. And so I will say to you that what I think about at San Mar--and Jill Watts. So let me tell you, Jill Watts is still there. She is a historian beyond historians. And, and I talked about her in, in my commencement speech that the best African American History class I have ever taken is by a white woman. Hands down. She is brilliant. She is, you know, phenomenal. It's funny, even when I worked at (California State) San Marcos, I wouldn't see her as much, but she would just beam every time that she saw me because she knew who I was as a student. I remember that Peter Zwick, I don't know if you've heard that name. He used to be over (at) Global Affairs at the time, but was really a hard, hard political science instructor. Like people were scared of him. Hard. And I decided, 'cause I was lost, I was gonna do Poli Sci as a major. And he, I went to him, who's my faculty advisor too. He must've been. And I sat there and I said, “I'm graduating in May.” And he was like, “Dilcie, how are you graduating when you haven't hardly taken any political science classes?” I was like, “It’s a technicality. Technicality.” So I took twenty-one units, most of those political science classes, upper division in one semester. Ho: Wow! Perez: I thought I was going to die. And I think a few of them, 'cause he was a hard one, like one or two were with him. But I will tell you this, is that one, it was hard 'cause I was working and taking twenty-one units and picking up. But I will tell you that that was the best I did. That was the only semester I've ever made Dean's list (laughs) in my college career, because I knew I didn't have a lot of room to play. But I will say to you that as I think about (Cal State) San Marcos, it was pivotal to me because of the relationships, particularly with faculty that I established. Denise Hollis was administration, but we were, we used to go to a Third Word Counselor's Association. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but it was years ago, and it was doing DEI work, and they were taking us there to those events. But even during the time, so I didn't get involved in a lot of co-curricular events. I have a colleague now, that used to work at Chancellor's Office and I just had an event for her. And I was like, we went to college together at (CSU) San Marcos. She's very--Sabrina Sanders. We went to college. And I was like, I don't completely remember her, but we went to college together. Right. Because she remembers me. And I just wasn't involved in a co-curricular way. So I would tell you my co-curricular experience really was the relationships with them. But we did a play. So this is in the archives as well, but for Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Wasn’t Enough (Is Enuf). Ho: Okay. Perez: We, we all practiced for months. I--months on weekends and nights and did this two-weekend play or maybe one weekend. And it was in like the school newspaper. Gezai (Berhane) showed it to me later, that we all did this play. It was sold out in ACD 102 sold out. It was just wonderful. That--those are the pivotal moments for me. My orientation, my relationship with faculty, my--spending time in that (production). That's what I think when I think about my (CSU) San Marcos experience that I treasure the most. Ho: That's lovely. Thank you. And what did you say the title of that play was? Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 4 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Perez: For Color Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow (Is) Enuf. So it's about seven African American women and the diversity of their life. Ho: Thank you. Perez: Yeah, it has some pretty heavy topics in it, quite honestly. And so that's what made it so impressive quite honestly. Yeah. Ho: And can you speak a bit about--about the culture on campus for you as a student? Whatever comes to mind, but in particular I'm interested in, in culture and community and, and DEI and, and different groups of students. Perez: So, that's an interesting, I am grateful for this question. I don't think that I was mindful enough to know at the time with words and language what I was experiencing. I think I felt like I mattered. That I was making relationships and making connections. And I, and I hate to--I don't always like the cliche of mattering and belonging because I think people have to unpack that and think about what that means. But I will tell you, I felt like I belonged at (CSU) San Marcos from day one. From day one. And so--but I also didn't have a lot of needs, right? So at that point in time for the two years that I was there, two or three I think it served the need that I had as a non-traditional student. When I came back in (19)97, the campus had changed because the first-year students came in (19)95. So it was not the same. We--I could tell we were going through an identity crisis, right? We were planning the 10th anniversary event when I returned, and I brought the (laughs) Charger girls. I was gonna bring them to the event. And I don't know if you know, but back in the day and you have to be careful about this, this part, but back in the day we had a librarian who was heavily involved in the campus and (laughs). Ho: Okay Perez: And there was a lot of music, it (was) like jazz, right? That works for an older population. And so it was wonderful for the campus when there was juniors and seniors and older people, but first-year students and sophomores (laughs), I don’t--jazz isn’t it all--like, we have to be more than that. And so I really was proud of myself, quite honestly. And I was like, I got the Charger girls! They're coming into this event. They literally took me to, we--I don't know if you've heard of Surge? So Surge used to be the coffee shop. Ho: Okay. Perez: That was on the corner, kind of down by--by Block C by, you know where the quad is? It was on the corner there. There's a real estate office there now. They took me down to the Surge for coffee and they said, “We don't want T&A at our event.” Like, and I said, “What? Like, the Charger girls are like, like professionals (laughs)! Like they, they're not, they're not T&A, what’re you talking about?” But they would not let me bring the Charger girls to that event. I had to cancel them. Ho: Oh my goodness. Wow. Perez: And I think that the campus was in that transition from this kind of older and more mature thing to saying we have to be more relate--like, I was trying to push us to be more relatable and it did not work that day at all (laughs). Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 5 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Ho: Wow, what a conversation that must have been. Perez: Oh, it was fun. But you know, I've always, I've always liked to get into good trouble, right? Ho: Yeah. Perez: And so for me it was then how are we meeting the needs of students? Because what we, what we did for, it was supposed to be like 10th anniversary in a preview day, and it really was just, you know, the same old thing that we had been doing all of that, that time period. So-Ho: Okay. Perez: Yeah. Ho: Did--are you saying the event turned out to be kind of the same old, same old? Perez: Uh-huh, uh-huh. Ho: Okay. Okay. Perez: 10th anniversary jazz ensemble (laughs). Yeah. Ho: Okay. Okay. Perez: And people showed up, but it wasn't what you really would think of, of a traditional college experience. So we went through transitional times such as that. Ho: Okay. Well that's a good segue into the Cross-Cultural Center then. So when you were a student at that time, there was not a Cross-Cultural Center, is that correct? Perez: That's correct. Ho: Okay. So when you came back to CSUSM in a staff role what are your first memories of rumblings of a Cross-Cultural Center, of a Multicultural Center? Do you remember? Perez: None. None. So let me put the context around, and this is where it--it's a, it's an interesting story. So if I go back to (19)98, (19)97, I worked in Student Academic Services Outreach Program. So SASOP doing early outreach, motivation, academic preparation. And I would say that that team and the people were diverse. We had the Dome (food services originally operated by San Diego State University’s Aztec Shops) as a space, which was really, if I remember correctly, only the primary kind of student-centered space. There wasn't a lot, you had lunch there, right? And you ate there, everything happened in the Dome. I would say to you, we were going through as a division, a lot of work around our values and trying to clarify and integrate our values in our, in for the team. And I would say to you what was hard, I'm trying to remember. I remember that there were WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges) self-study and that it came back with some campus climate challenges. Ho: Uh-hmm. Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 6 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Perez: And I remember, and all my years kind of blur, right? So, but I have a time period of when, like pre--I have to explain it. But when I was in SASOP, I was heavily involved in a lot of different things. In outreach. And I remember, I think during that time, there was a noose hanging on the tree outside of Academic Hall. Not, excuse me, I'm lying to you. Outside of the Administration Building. So that fifth, fifth floor, you have Founders' Plaza, there was that--there's a tree there. Ho: Yeah. Perez: That tree had a noose. And so that caused a lot of energy. So the part that's interesting is that I was heavily involved in the community. I was working tremendously. And I think I had kind of burnt out, honestly, in outreach. So I was there five and a half, six years, and I had been thinking about, I need to change. I need to do something differently. And so I was driving to work one day, and I had talked to my ex-husband. I was like, “I think I'm, I'm done. Like, I'm tired, like I'm exhausted.” And he, he said, “(I) support you, do what you need to do.” And I had written a letter and I had it for like months and I hadn't done anything with it. And then one day I was driving to work and I can tell you exactly where I was when I was driving to work. And I said, “I'm done.” And so I came in to the office and I gave them my notice. And one thing that I will tell you is that when someone quits a job and gets another job, most people will say, “Oh, Jennifer got another job. She's moving on to better things.” Well, you get a lot of attention when you say, “I'm leaving.” And they're like, “Where are you going?” And I'm like, “Nowhere. I'm just done here.” And so folks in administration came to me and they said, “Hey, you know, we don't want you to leave. What's going on?” And one of the administrators said, “If we create an opportunity for you, will you stay?” And I was like, “Eh, I don't, I don't think so. No, no, no. I--I'm pretty tired.” And the campus threw a big going away party for me, huge. But what they had said to me is, “Leave, go ahead. Take two weeks. Don't, we're not gonna submit everything. You go think about this opportunity and let us know.” And I will tell you that it was until that last day, I think they had given me till 1:00 PM and they said, and I called at twelve fiftyfive because I wasn't going to do it. I was tired. And the opportunity that they had was the Associate Director of Multicultural Programs. And so that was the first start to the Cross-Cultural Center. So that is how, honestly, it really--and so I'll tell you that what I know now, after I got into that position was we were doing 2010 visioning at that time. And I, this was, you're talking 2002 when I, when I shifted. Two thousand two/three. And they had already, I would say Jonathan Pollard, you've probably heard that name, and Bridget Blanshan. Ho: Uh-hmm. Perez: They had done some visioning, 2010 visioning. And, and I don't know, I could, I don't, I can't dig probably for you, but they have it-Ho: Um-hmm. Perez: This document. And in it, they had said they wanted to open Multicultural Programs and hire and do a space. So what happened, I believe, is that there was me saying, “I'm outta (laughs). I'm gone.” The campus not wanting to necessarily just let me walk away. And knowing they had an opportunity for strength and growth under Bridget is when I accepted and changed and came and opened Multicultural Programs. Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 7 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Ho: Wow. It's a good thing you put in that notice. Perez: Oh, who you telling (Ho laughs)? 'Cause the campus one, I'll tell you this. And if I'm being quite honest, and I, if I had tried to apply for that type of role--as an outsider to a place, I don't, I would've not received that role. I didn't have the pedigree. I didn't have, you know, sure I had some of the education, but what people used to say at the time is that you're not a traditional Student Affairs practitioner. And I actually resent that type of statement because I don't think there's a traditional student affairs person anymore. Like that's old thinking. Ho: Uh-hmm. Perez: But I would say to you that I think I wouldn't have, I, what, what I believe was happening is I had established strong relationships. People knew my quality of work, knew that I would come in and at least set the ground running. That, that that's what I did. And so, honestly, when I came in, started the position, and literally I was in a cubicle inside on the fourth floor of Craven (Hall) and really had to set the, the vision. And so I met with nineteen, twenty people and I said, “What are our needs on campus? What do we think we should be doing? What do you want Multicultural Programs to be?” And I created oh my gosh, so many programs that first year. Like I was a party of one and a student assistant. But we started, I remember, oh, I can't remember. There's, there has to be somewhere. I did a flag, it had international flags everywhere. And we did a culture of celebration, or celebration of culture. Celebration of Culture was the first event. And then in that time, we started with--I partnered with Jonathan (Pollard) to start the African American Faculty Staff Association. We did the fires. We had the (brush) fires. And so we, because part of my job was volunteerism too. They threw volunteerism and engagement in there. So I did a fire, a drive, a, a clothing drive for the for out of the center for the victims of the fire. I did Soul Food Lunch, helped start Soul Food Lunch, which is gone now, but Soul Food Lunch, I think we did over 20 programs that first year that I was there. But it was all because of what people told me they wanted and what we needed. Oh, Powwow! I did the planning of the (Tukwut) Powwow with everyone. I, oh man. I could try and go back. Like we just, it, it really, I was, it was a way in which I could engage the community and build relationships across the campus. And so that is the foundation for how I really began to, I think cement my knowledge base in DEIJ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice). Was really kind of this piecemealing and building. And so the piece that I will tell you is I, between Bridget (Blanshan) and I, I can't--we advocated for the space next door to Student Life and Leadership. And it's a square wall. It was it--that room? Hon--it is so small. Do you hear me? It is so small. But, we put a couch. I went and got a couch from (unclear) who, I don't know if you know her, she works. I went to her house and picked up a couch. We got--we built me a cubicle in there because I thought it was important to have a separation of space between any students. We did all this stuff. Oh my gosh. We were in there and they tried to come and take that space. I remember one of our academic colleagues, literally, I was sitting in the space and I turned around and she's standing there summing up the space for sure. And didn't say a word to me, and then turned around and walked out. And I remember going to Bridget and saying, “You've got to be kidding me. Right?” Like, you can't come while someone's sitting in the space trying to sum it up for, 'cause space wars were real. Ho: Um-hmm. Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 8 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Perez: And I think at that time, people didn't realize the power of a Cross-Cultural Center. And there was intentionality and, you know, we called it Multicultural Programs. And then I opened up the CrossCultural Center, and literally, as I see how you've written it, we had, do you put the dash in between Cross-Cultural Center and do we not? And later on there was the, the version of, is it C3, which we branded and branded well. And then, then people hated that brand, and then they had to move, which is fine, right? But I often, I laugh because I can't believe that the Cross-Cultural name has still stayed. And, and I'm exceptionally proud. This part, we may not wanna put too public, but that's the one center that has had no controversy (laughs) on the campus. Ho: Really (both talking)? Perez: Right? Yeah. Ho: So there was no pushback or anything when you started? Perez: Nah, Nah, none. No. Um-um. And they could have. But I think because the campus was small, I had great relationships. The way in which I did--did it in relationship. It was a community effort. People were engaged, people were support(ive). None. None. But I will say to you too that the way in which we approached DEI work was pretty soft at that time. You know, it was a very supportive nature. I wasn't tackling policy. I wasn't, you know, tackling searches and recruitments, and I was building community and that level of awareness around what we can do collectively. I think I wrote a mission in the beginning. But here's the thing: I will tell you that I was, in my humble opinion, the grassroots person, because I got it going. And gave, gave. And then I was there 18 months maybe, and then I moved to Japan. And when I came back, Alexis Motevirgin had taken it to a more formal place. And, and I was like, I think we had a mission statement back then? But Alexis, I think really formalized the mission and the work. I just, I just was the grassroots starter for all of that at the time. And then Alexis came, stayed just a few months, right? And then I, I think that I hired Augie (Augustin Garibay) and he didn't stay very long. Augie Garibay and then hired Sara, Sara Sheikh. And then she stayed for a little bit and moved on. And then Floyd (Lai), and he's the longest standing. Really, I think built a solid foundation. I was there. So this is where it gets weird. Because I was, I would say the associate director, or the first, however we wanna frame it for Cross-Cultural Center. But I was there from 2003-ish to (200)4 into (200)4, so probably eighteen months. And then I went to Japan, and I was gone a year and a half, and then I came back. So part of my work in the evolution of the Cross-Cultural Center, was when I was the Director of Student Life, and it was in my portfolio. So had the ability--so I was making--I hate, I feel awkward because it's almost like you're bragging. And so I'm trying not to brag. But we used to make lots of deals back then. So I would hustle to make deals for space, quite honestly. And so--we moved Student Life. So this was part of the plan. We moved Student Life to third floor, right? And that in the rotunda, I don't know what's the, it's Guardian Scholars, I think there're now, but it has a weird kind of diagonal room. Ho: Um-huh. Perez: So we went from the fourth floor down to the rotunda, and it was small in an awkward space, small. So we were there not too long. And then I worked a deal to switch. We put Leadership Programs down, I believe, or student org(anization)s down in the rotunda and in Commons 206 area, right across where I think Alumni Affairs is. We got a really good space and partnered with ASI (Associated Students Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 9 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Incorporated), they gave us that space to put the Cross-Cultural Center up there. And that's when the Cross-Cultural Center got its real visibility because it was in a prominent space, gorgeous space. Great. We had couches. Alexis, you might hear in stories about these beautiful red couches. So by the time I came back from Japan, these beautiful red couches were in the space. Those couches have lasted for a long time. People used those couches. I, when I got back, I actually--I tell people at the Chancellor's Office, bought a TV for the space. I wanted to buy a TV to do announcements on this, on the thing. And this isn't, you're talking about 2000. Whatever. And Bridget was so cute. She was like, “What are your student learning outcomes for them?” And I was like, “What?” So, you know, I had to, you know, write whatever. And then some things happened with staffing, and someone filed a whistleblower on me for buying the TV. Because I bought the TV. Uh-huh. And so I had to defend at the--for the Chancellor's office why I bought this TV for this Cross-Cultural Center back in the day. So it's interesting that what we consider is normal, were some things that as you build the infrastructure, right? And, you know, when you build something like this, people want it to be all things to all people. And I think that when I started, that was easy because it was just building. But as you've seen the iteration, I think each of the people who have led it have really had to think about what is the purpose of the center and the space, and how can it be most effective? Ho: So then when you were, when you were building, what was the purpose of it in your mind? Perez: Yeah. I think one, to provide space, a safe space for our students. To be a centralized resource and location. So I would say to you that in some ways I was, you know, the start of a diversity person on the campus in that realm. It was kind of a catchall at that time. I think that it, it--whether articulated or not, was to build really kind of the celebratory awareness events. And have the visibility and do that work to acknowledge the diversity of our communities on the campuses. And I--I'm having a hard time kind of remembering between the two roles, but I began to get brought into, we had an Institute for Social Justice and Equity that was created, a center. And that when I got back, we were heavily involved in. A lot of the bias response pieces because of student life I was involved in. And so I think it became a resource. And when I got back from the CSU--when I got back from Japan, I will tell you that it was then that I--we got really involved in more serious things. So some of the campus climate pieces, the WASC pieces, there was a, maybe diversity committee that was working on a diversity statement for the campus that I think we worked on that for a long time and it never got out. But what did get out of that or come out of that work on that committee was the very first Diversity Officer. And so that was Gary Rollinson, who then I think in that. Dowd, spent some time in that. And then, you know, (Willie) “Derrick” Crawford, and then now, you know, there's Arturo Ocampo and then Aswad (Allen, current Chief Diversity Officer). So, I think it was the foundational really for a lot of the diversity work that was happening on the campus. Ho: So, you mentioned when we first started this conversation, you were really a part of a lot of different communities as a kid. So military, you were adopted, which I imagine had a profound impact on your sense of identity and being. And then moving from place to place and having to integrate yourself into these different places. So, do you think that that this childhood experience of--of being maybe different in so many ways from so many different people, had any impact on, on this career that you found yourself in at CSUSM? Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 10 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Perez: Oh, I love this question. I don't know. When I was doing my doctoral work there was a pivotal, a quote that has been pivotal to my life. It says, “Everything changes, everything's connected, pay attention.” And I would say to you that while I was trying to figure out what the purpose of my life was going to be, (laughs) working at GEICO, coming to work in outreach, right? Susan Mitchell, who has since passed away, was a great mentor in telling me I was a leader without the position. Like in instilling this belief in me, I would say to you that every experience I had at (CSU) San Marcos prepared me for that role. That my work in outreach and Student Affirmative Action to the Third Word Counseling Association that I talked to you about, to the outreach to the people that I worked with and the value statements to the engagement that I had as a student. Yeah. I mean, all of that. I think you pull from those as tools, right? What I do think helped is I love the community. And I think to your point I don't think even then I understood as a student what it meant to be an African American woman. I don't know that I understood how all of my identities felt, but I did know what it meant to feel like you mattered and belonged, and how to resource and the support on the campus. That even though I'm not first gen(eration), both of my parents went to college, I know I struggled at points. Like, it wasn't until I applied to go to grad school that I realized I pulled my (CSU) San Marcos transcript, and I was like, “Really? I wasn't that bad of a student. Why did I feel like I wasn't a good student?” Like, I literally did not see myself as a good student, right? I was just doing what I needed to do to possibly get out. You know, my GPA ended up like a 3.11, but all the stuff I was doing and the movement and the, you know--but I, I would say to you that I think that sure, I pull on all of that because you want students to have a good experience. And what has happened since then with my research around a concept called Third Space, I do believe it's our role to break down any obstacles and challenges that students have to face. And I think that's the way in which I've approached the work is that sometimes it's, it's our organizational structures that are weeding students out. And that to me is probably the greatest social inequity of all. Ho: Especially on a college campus of all things. Perez: Especially on a college campus. That's supposed to, while we reflect society, we should often we should be a safe space. Ho: Hmm. Perez: I will tell you that during my time, so you're talking when I was director of SLL (Student Life and Leadership), then the Associate Dean, then Dean of Students, right? So all these are kind of merged, but once the Cross-Cultural Center opened, I had the opportunity to partner with John Segoria and Vicki Hernandez to open the Veterans Center. Then the president pulled on a team of us after a list of demands. And I just, I had the opportunity a few years ago to participate in the Latino Resource Center and helping them get started. And that came out of crisis. And so we created that. That I--I was gonna tell you some piece about that, but oh, that Floyd had invited me back, I think, for the 15th year. Or whatever. And when we were opening the Latino Resource Center, some folks thought that as we were having that, I would, I would raise questions. And I said, “If we, if we open a Latino Resource Center (Latin@/X Center), are we ready to open a center for all identities?” Because that's what's gonna happen. And I'm, and, and people thought I was against it, and I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no.” Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 11 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Because if you look, we had started the Cross-Cultural Center because we understood that the intersectionality of all of our identities. And so we were trying to build the model originally off of the value of the intersectionality. Right? And then as life happens in society and on the campus, there was a need. And so the Latino Resource Center, I was like, I'm not against it. I'm just asking are we ready to open additional centers? And to the president's credit, she was, because then the Black Resource Center (Black Student Center) came, the Dreamer Center came, right? And additional centers. And so I will tell you that when he invited me to come back for the 15th year and speak, I wrote a speech that I had to think about because I was like, where am I at? Is it Cross-Cultural Center or is it all the different identity-based centers? And I will tell you, I was at MiraCosta (Community College) at the time, and I wrote in the speech, I said, until we make DEIJ training mandatory across the institution, because the reality is those that choose to come to the trainings do, but those aren't the folks who are making it a chilly spot. Not always discriminatory, but chilly, and making it difficult for students until they are mandated to go to training and they get to opt out. Oh, we best believe we need centers. Ho: Um-hmm. Perez: To get rid of all of the isms, to get rid of all the things that are hindering our students. You absolutely need a safe space. And so I am for whatever identity-based center we feel like we need that can validate students, provide the academic and co-curricular support to students all day, every day. So I put that in the speech, right? That at, at the 15th (year) and tell me that the students at MiraCosta got a hold of that speech somehow, and they were trying to fight for a Latino center. And they quoted that speech and plastered it all over campus, because they also feel like if she's saying that we need that there, why wouldn't we need that here? And so, I will tell you, I've shifted my approach, actually. I think cross-cultural is important, but I, I think identity-based centers as we need them, are critically important until we're going to focus on the entire organization and hold everyone accountable to creating student support. You know, it's not, I--I really, quite honestly, you have a choice to believe what you want to believe. I'm not here to, to force people to believe. But what you can't do, or what you won't do is weed a student out because of your beliefs. Ho: Um-hmm. Perez: Or cause an obstacle for a student. That, that we, we need to understand that there are societal injustices, that mirror themselves in our college campuses that we need to mitigate if we're really truly serious about doing this work. Ho: Could you elaborate a bit on--on why identity focused centers are so important and also their relationship to a, a Multicultural Center? Like what, what is, what is the difference, frankly? Perez: Well, I don't know. And I, and I would tell you, I think Floyd's been working on that, right? Because what you probably know is that we had so many discussions in the beginning because the students, it was always busy in the Cross-Cultural Center. But it was our APIDA (Asian-Pacific Islander Desi American) students that were in there and using the space. And so people were like, “Well, you have to have an APIDA center 'cause that's who's in there.” And we had so many conversations in the beginning around how do you diversify the space. Because it's not just about our APIDA students. The reality is it is any student taking territory. Claiming territory. Like what do you do to make sure the space Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 12 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 is, you know, culturally diverse? And at some point, we just gave up quite honestly, because we didn't feel like that was our right to then try and mess with the dynamics. Like create a space where people, if they choose to walk in the door, that they would feel welcome. Does that make sense? But we will not exclude anyone from the spaces like the space. That's what it is here for. And so, I will tell you that I think that I don't know, and I haven't been connected in a very long time, in an in-depth way, if we have ever clearly achieved the, the goal of the intersectionality and how a Cross-Cultural center or could really, really benefit that. I think you would, quite honestly, there's nuances between multicultural and cross-cultural, right? And I think you will play, people don't call, and they may now. Multicultural. And so Multicultural Programs died that, that term. I think I-- and Floyd had it in his title for a while, but I can't remember where that ended up. But I would say to you that I think as we think about the future, that really is the essence. That the identity-based senders, I don't, you can't silo my identity, right? So I am an African-American woman. Does that make sense? I am a military dependent family member. That is a huge, huge part of my identity. I am a woman. Gender Equity Center. I am an ally to LGBTQ. Like, so to think that a student, we can silo the identities of students? But what I will tell you is this, I find community in ways that are authentic to me. So what I love about the identity based, and it's a different idea, is I get to choose which identity I'm (unclear) in those moments. I don't have to pick them, because I do think sometimes in our work, we're back to the melting pot concept, where we're like, “Let's just be all happy and get along.” And we really don't create that space for the uniqueness of our identities to come forward. So what I love about where (CSU) San Marcos is now is honestly, yeah. They were willing to open centers for like, when I was there. There's two other centers popping up, right? You know, what I, what I think is interesting is you have the National Latino Resource Center. And you have the Latino Resource Center (Latin@/X Center), and you have the Dreamers Center. And my question is, how are all of them partnering and working together? And are we creating living learning spaces? Because I will tell you, I don't think you need separate spaces just for belonging. What we need are spaces that allow a student to live and to learn. And often the connection to academic, their academics is critically important. Does that make sense? Like, I will tell you, I do a lot of work around basic needs. This is not a popular statement that I'm about to make, but everything we do for students' basic needs should be connected to them moving forward to achieve their educational goals. Period. If we're not helping a student progress forward or persist, the reality (is) we're not a social service agency. That is not our area of expertise. What we are is, as I see Jennifer as a student, Jennifer has needs, some of them are more immediate, some are more long-term. So, Jennifer, how can I help connect you for your immediate, basic needs, to a community organization? Cal-fresh. Housing. That can help you so that I'm not, I'm, I'm helping you to fish. Not just trying to fix this need right now. Because oftentimes people will say, “Well, Jennifer can't go to school because she has so many life things.” And I'm like, yeah, but the reality is we have to balance, how do we supply the needs? So Jennifer, 'cause that's, that's social mobility for a student. That's what's gonna change a life. That's what, that's what we want. We wanna change our life through helping Jennifer get their degree. Ho: Yeah Perez: Am I preaching to you? But that's what, to me, the crux of what we're doing is, I think every campus is gonna be different, quite honestly. And I think (CSU) San Marcos has found its niche, right? I Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 13 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 think when it moved all the identity-based centers into a unit. So that they can collaborate, coordinate, partner. I think it's fabulous. Ho: So do you see do you see a trend with college campuses overall moving from multicultural centers to, to these focused, identity-based? Perez: So I've changed and morphed a little bit too. And I will tell you that it's funny. My, my vision is similar, but different. And I think that's from being at (CSU) San Marcos, but also having the identitybased spaces conversation at MiraCosta Community College, and then Cerritos College, and then now in the system. I would tell you my ideal, which is not new to me. Does that make sense? It's just the model, model that I love, is where you have this cross-- and this kind of was where we had started, but it never got there. Cross-Cultural is the hub, right? But then you would have physical spaces because symbolism matters to identities. But you would have some spaces connected. So you could have your LGBTQIA, you could have Gender Equity, you could have, you know, I'm trying to—Black--you know, all the different centers that aren't necessarily disconnected. The hub is the cross-cultural part. So (California State University) Fullerton, to my understanding, has this model where they have a coordinator for each, but they're all interconnected in their work and in the way they do this. That to me is the ideal quite honestly. I don't think having separate spaces across campuses, across whatever are the ideal. I think having them where there could be a synergy together. I think (CSU) San Marcos is close, right? Because most of them are in the (University Student) Union. They've done a really good job of trying to put everything in the Union. Some are a few out, you know, I used to serve on the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center’s taskforce. And then, you know, I just learned they're working to do a Native Center. And I was like, but you have two, like two spaces, like two, like what's the difference? So, you know, I don't know where it starts or stops. I just think that each campus has to have its hand on the pulse of what their students need. And I think engaging faculty in these spaces matters. You know, that is one of the most critical relationships. Is I've talked about my experiences. You know, it could be a staff member. Absolutely. But your faculty relationships matter. Ho: Yeah. When you were, when you were starting out as this, as the Associate--Associate Director-(Both talking) Perez: Director-Ho: --of Multicultural Spaces, is that correct? Perez: Multicultural Programs. (Both talking) Ho: Multicultural Programs. Perez: Um-huh. Ho: Okay. Thank you. You said you spoke to different people on campus. Did that include students and faculty as well? Perez: Yeah. You know, it--my world was so blended. So the, the, the thing that's a little different at (CSU) San Marcos--so when I left San Marcos in 2016, I would tell you and I give all credit, Lorena, Mesa, Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 14 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 and Checka at the time, they threw a phenomenal party. I would tell you mostly faculty were there, right? So the way in which I navigated the campus was really fluid between Student Affairs and Academic Affairs. Ho: Um-hmm. Perez: Yes. I mean, I would tell you, like, can I remember? I--I think I met with Gary Rollinson. I think I remember meeting with advisors. I think students, I don't have the list, obviously. It was 19 years ago. Which is crazy. But yeah, I mean, I think we, we just were more fluid between the organization back then that, yeah, I remember meeting with as many people that would meet with me. Ho: That's great. And did that include students as well? Perez: Yes. But I can't tell you the exact names of the students. Yes. Ho: Oh, that's okay. That's fine. One of my questions on my list here is what did the students say that they wanted? Perez: Yeah. Yeah. I think what's hard for me is what a student would say today and what a student would say in 2004 are very different things. So I think we're, we are more knowledgeable about DEIJ language. And about--I hate to say it this way, but the hatred, the discrimination, the oppression that's in the world. And I think that at the point when we started our work around DEI was still kind of in the--I I hate to say it, in the happy phase. So you know how I said the Latino Center--resource center was built out of crisis, right? And the Black Resource Center, I think a crisis. Veterans Center, not so much. I think it was us being strategic and the community. But the Cross-Cultural Center wasn't built out of a crisis. It was built out of an opportunity to strengthen the student experience and to create a resource for students. So I would say to you that I think students at that point were wanting a sense of community. Does that make sense? Wanting a pla-- a space. So space, which we gave. They wanted the celebratory aspects. Like we talked about the Powwow, and I don't know if the powwow has come back to San Marcos. It was huge, the Powwow, huge, huge! It took months to plan those things. So I went in as the University Liaison to the groups to help them plan that. Gala GATSA for the Oaxacan community. I was on the Gala GATSA community. I remember sitting in the back and, and I think this is me and CrossCultural Center, literally (laughs). I had never been to a Gala GATSA before. It was five thousand people! Do you hear me? Five thousand. We, this was, these were huge community events. I was sitting in the back next to and Humberto Garcia, (Jr.). I don't know if he's still there in risk managing--manager. Girl, they threw whole pineapples and cantaloupes through the audience. I'm literally standing there and I was like, is that, is that a whole pineapple? That's a tradition in the, like, in that, you know. But so for us, I think it was more of just really being there to support students. It wasn't until I became a dean, quite honestly, and I got into to the associate director (position) that I started tackling some of those more difficult, sensitive--it was probably director on that, that I was in those conversations that were tackling some of the discrimination that was happening on campuses. You know, there were many conversations where faculty members were saying and doing things that they shouldn't be saying or doing that I as a dean or you know, would say, you can't, that's, you can't do that (laughs). Like, no. Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 15 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 We had a faculty member that were, they were very upset about students and their perception of, and they tried to kick students out of the class. And you know, I went in and the faculty member literally when I went in and said, “What the f are you doing here?” And I was like, “You have a right to an advocate and so do students. And so I'm here as a student advocate.” And so we had the conversation and that faculty member said, “You're wasting my effing time.” And just so you're, you're taught if I'm dealing with this! If, if I'm dealing with this as an administrator, and, and mind you, that person was a person of color that said this, it was not, you know, so I--I don't want to send the wrong, it was a person of color. That, you know, and there's a, a story that I've told, and I'll, I know it's seven (o’clock), but I, there's a story that I, I've told publicly. So I started the, it was the Celebration of Culture. 'Cause we used to do it a lot. The Celebration of Culture in the beginning. And so it was, I think an acknowledgement and recognition, of the work that was being done on the campuses. And I was--we had a first Amendment issue that happened when I was an administrator. And we had a controversial speaker that was on campus that was very discriminatory. And we called a meeting and we had a conversation. And in this meeting were a whole bunch of administrators. And someone was giving examples and they said, well, Dilcie, if you--someone called you the N word--and used the word--we wouldn't, you know, this is what would happen or whatever. And then they went to, if someone called you a whore. And then they went to me. And I didn't realize how upset I was getting in this meeting. And the person that was sitting next to me put their hand on my lap and stop me, just help stop me from shaking. And they said, “Can we stop using Dilcie as the example?” And the person said, “I didn't know if Dilcie was Black. I thought she was a hot-headed Puerto Rican.” And mind you, I was an administrator on the campus. Administrator on campus. And finally someone had enough sense to say, “We need to end this meeting.” So we all went our separate ways. And the next morning went in the meeting and I just, I just, I, I was so upset. So, so, so upset. And so they said, you know, we're gonna have this person, you know, apologize, whatever. And so the person came and gave me a half-baked apology. And so a year, a couple years went by. And they came and asked me to do the keynote for, it was, it must have been Celebration of Culture or something at the time. I can't remember. And I decided that one, I would never share who the person was 'cause that wasn't important, but that we were gonna tell the story. And so publicly, in front of 250 people, Executive Council, we did a split screen. And so the person who served as my ally in that moment, and me had a screen between us and we told the story of what happened that day. And with the point of, you never know when you're gonna need an ally. And you never know, even as an administrator, if it can happen to an administrator, it can happen to a student. And so, (CSU) San Marcos, we say that we're inclusive and that we value these things? We need to, we need to be serious about it. Right? And so at the end of the speech, the room did not move, Jennifer. It was silent. And I thought, oh no, I've lost my job. Like I, it is not good. And all of a sudden it broke out into applause and the room stood up and everybody was so happy. And I received so much support, quite honestly, for that. And the president called me, she said, “Is there anything I need to do?” And I was like, “No.” Like, “I just needed you to hear, there's nothing, thank you. Nothing.” And so a few years later they said, “Dilcie, we're gonna have to put you on a team with this person.” And I was like, “No buddy, no, you're not.” And they said, “Yeah, like, we have no choice.” And I said, “Let them say one dumb thing. I'm telling you I'm not putting up with it. I'm not mess--like one dumb thing.” And this person, and I served on this team together for about a year and a half, two Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 16 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 years. And about after a year of us working together, we were sitting in my office on a, working on a tough case. And they said, “I just want to truly, truly apologize for what happened. I'm sorry. I was ignorant. I didn't know any better. I know better now. I'm very sorry.” To that point, that individual and I are exceptionally close to this day. I have been to their home, have been to events at their house. He knows not to say those dumb things anymore. But he, there is, there is--there is restoration in some of those things. There is forgiveness, there is learning, there is growth. Does that make sense? And so I share that very long story to say that when I think about (CSU) San Marcos is at the core of, no matter what happens at the Cross-Cultural Center, at the identity based cen-it's relation, it is about relationships. When students were picketing over, some things happened at the campus. The president had the reports to the community. And I went out and I was on the picket line with the students. And someone got back to me that someone said, “I don't like Dilcie. 'Cause she's out there picketing with the students.” No, I wasn't, I was making sure the students had their right to use their voice and that it didn't impact the event, but they had a right to be there. And so let's do that in a way that's supportive of them. Right? When the abortion people came, they may still come with the big signs. (Perez holds hands up over her head) We sat down and had a team and said, “Here's the deal. You're gonna have protestors. Let's manage it accordingly.” I remember putting blue tape right down the middle and said, “Here's the space (laughs), and here's your space. Have at it be respectful.” Be--and I walked down and supported both sides as they did those things. Because I think to me while -- and I think a lot of people on the campus believe this -- while we want to be protected from hateful language, the reality of this is the world that we live in. And what we have to do is create a space where all voices can be heard. Ho: Uh-huh. Perez: And you have a right to safety. You absolutely do, but you don't have a right to be unoffended. Because I will tell you that in the first days of (CSU) San Marcos, there were all kinds of speakers that came that I didn't necessarily agree with. But what I loved is being exposed to ideas that were different than mine that helped to validate. Or invalidate my thought process that made me think about what I believed and didn't believe. That to me is the essence of higher education. That's where I think a CrossCultural Center, it's not that you say everything that's popular or bring one side and one belief. You have to be balanced. Ho: Thank you so much for sharing those stories and those memories. They really provide context to what the campus was. And a lot of it is behind the scenes that people wouldn't know, wouldn't expect. Especially students going about their day to day. So thank you for doing that. (both talking) Perez: That's right. There is, I mean, I think they can't, that (CSU) San Marcos is not a perfect place. But what I will say to you is I have, I have the opportunity to view all twenty-three (CSU campuses) now, and I’m oh so appreciative of the DEIJ, the Cross-Cultural Center, the work that's happening at San Marcos in this area. Yeah. Ho: You've mentioned some names of people that you've worked with, people you appreciate, are there, who are some more people that were really important to the Cross-Cultural Center that we might not know about? Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 17 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Perez: I--if you haven't talked to Jonathan Pollard, I think you should find him. He was the Dean of Students at the time who, who really said we're gonna make this happen. And he was part of that with Bridget (Blanshan) that did the 2010. And I think he had the original vision for it. So I would, I think he is part of that. I think, you're gonna ask me and I--Janet Perez-Covacevich, I have to think she was the first student assistant in that space. Ho: Hey, I was gonna ask you about your, that student assistant. Perez: Janet Perez. First, and let me give you her number 'cause I know it by heart from even back then. Ho: Okay. Let's do that via email. Okay. And not on this recording. Yeah. (both talking) Perez: Sure. So I can share that with you. And then Sida Munoz, I, she was in the center. She works at (CSU) San Marcos now. She was in the center in the very beginning a lot. I think sleeping and having space, but she partnered and volunteered a lot. We also added the Cross-Cultural Center and Multicultural Programs did the very first alternative spring break for the campus. So that was part of the work that we did that first year where we took students to San Francisco to the Glide to do work in the community. So that's a little tangential, that was more from the Multicultural programs. But it, all of that was flowing out of that space for sure. Ho: Thank you. Perez: You probably have most everybody else 'cause you have all the directors and everyone that worked there, right? Ho: Yeah. Floyd's reached out to--Floyd reached out to a lot of people. So we have-Perez: Yeah-- (both talking) Ho: --A lot of folks responding. Perez: Yeah, yeah. Totally. Ho: Including himself. Yeah. (both laugh) Perez: As he, as he should, he's done a marvelous job. Very proud. (both talking) Ho: Yeah. He really has. Perez: Yeah. Ho: I--how are we doing on time? Perez: I probably could give you a few more minutes and then yeah, head out. Are you clo-- are you good or do you have more? Ho: Yeah, I really would like to know a little bit more about you mentioned this concept of the third space. Could you tell me more about that in general or, and or as it relates to CSUSM? Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 18 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Perez: Sure. So during, you know, as folks try and figure out what they're studying and researching, I was exposed and I came, can't even tell you how to, a concept by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture that talks about when an individual transitions from one culture to the next, what they do is they take the unique strengths and characteristics of each of those cultures. So take the greatness, the goodness, and then make a third space out of it. And so my work is around breaking down the organizational silos between Academic Affairs and Student Affairs, particularly with the research. But I will say to you that I think that spaces like the Cross-Cultural Center, like identity-based centers are examples of third spaces where you take the unique strengths of faculty and Academic Affairs and the unique strengths of Student Affairs, and you put 'em together. And so the spaces could be, you know could be literally or figuratively. And so for me, as you think about the center space, these are, these should be third spaces where we blend both the best of both worlds. So that's the way in which I approach the work in my daily work, quite honestly, is that students don't care about our organizational silos. They really don't. And so how can we create more seamless, holistic experiences for students? Ho: Um-hmm. Thank you. Perez: Yeah. Ho: Could you tell us what you, what you do now at-Perez: In my current role? Ho: In your current role? Yes. (Perez laughs) Perez: So--so I left (California State University) San Marcos in 2016. I went to be the Dean of Student Life and Judicial Affairs at MiraCosta (Community College). So I was there two years. And then with my boss, who's amazing at the time, thought that I should consider being a vice president of student services. And so I left MiraCosta after two years and became the VP of Student Services and Associate Superintendent at Cerritos College. And so I was there almost four years. And then someone approached me about this job, which is, which was the Associate Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, Equity and Belonging in the CSU. Right? So really my work now is to bring--is, well, it's hard, but. So I work with all the diversity officers in the system. So I love that, quite honestly, on the system. And so it's been helpful because I have experience doing some of that work and so helpful to highlight the wonderful and important work that they're doing. But my role changed. So I--I am almost been here a year, but I was promoted to Deputy Vice Chancellor of Academic and Student Affairs. And so that was May 1st, but I will be the acting co-executive vice chancellor for the system for all of academic and student affairs. I know it's hard to keep up with. It's we, but it's movement. And so this position will, will really work with the presidents, provosts, and vice presidents. And the funny part is that Nathan Evans, I don't know if you know that name, he is a codeputy, but he worked with me at San Marcos. So we started our relationship there. And so people, the chancellor has seen how well we work together, and so we both were promoted to co-lead the division. Ho: That's wonderful. Well, congratulations on your, on your promotion. Perez: Thank you. It's a lot to take in. I, it's, I'm very humbled by it. But it's a, it's a big gig, so. Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 19 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Ho: Yeah. Perez: Yeah. Ho: Cool. I guess we could start wrapping up. Are there any memories or stories or anything that you'd like to share from your CSUSM days? Perez: No, I think I've shared a lot of wonderful memories. I mean, I think of--despite challenges, there really were some pivotal moments that framed me as personally and professionally. When you asked about it, I remember we were trying to beautify the center and Jay Franklin, I think was serving as an interim during that time. And we did a mural and I don't know if you know about the mural, but we came on a Saturday and it was a community mural. And it's so funny because the mural was hanging in the Cross-Cultural Center for years, and finally we were like, it's time to get rid of it. I was like, just let it go. And Floyd would not. And so it's hanging in the College of Humanities, Arts and Behavioral Sciences. The first Cross-Cultural (Center) mural is in that conference room. He had it moved there. And so I, I love that the campus is, I'm telling you, there were no obstacles. And I think that I will tell you that while I know that everyone is not for DEIJ work, that everyone at San Marcos is not for it, I do think that we have tried to address challenges and obstacles in a collaborative, supportive way to start. But I do think that as, as the work continues kind of the way in which we started the rah rah and the hooray, we can't remember, we can't forget, the essence of the work is really in addressing the social injustices that unfortunately have infiltrated their way onto our college campuses. That to me is the essence of the work: is we should be building students up and not tearing them down. We should be beacons of light and hope for societies that are uninterested in confronting the social injustices that have significantly, disproportionately impacted many marginalized populations. That should not be okay. That should not be okay. That if we are telling a student, we want you to come here, we need to do everything that we can to help them be successful. Ho: Thank you. Perez: Yes. Ho: That was beautifully said and I appreciate it. I also want to come back to that mural. Could you, in case nobody else in their interviews have talked about it, could you give me a little bit of info on it just so we have it for the record? Perez: Yeah. So it is interesting. The mural we knew we needed, so somebody else in another department, and I think it may have been CAMP (College Assistance Migrant Program), had brought an artist to the campus and talked to us about them doing this mural. For their, for their program. So Jay (Franklin) and I and Dick said, “We wanna do that.” So we paid to have the artists come. And it was a Saturday, and I think it was in U(niversity) Hall, outside U Hall 100. We all were there. And he takes you through this process of where you're thinking about community, thinking about what you want, and then you each had like a sliver of the panel that you did. And I can't remember if he, he must have drawn an outline, I'm guessing, if I remember correctly. And if you see it, there's so many vibrant colors, so many vibrant colors. And I actually think we need to pull it and take pictures and document even more. Floyd probably has access to 'em because I can see, I just remember when I would walk around the room and see what Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 20 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 people put, you were like, oh! And look at you (laughs). Right? But it represented the sense of community that was involved with the creation of the space. You have to remember, Cross-Cultural Center was there before any of the other centers. Ho: Yeah. Perez: It was the first, unless maybe not, maybe, and we have to confirm, National Latino Research Center may have been around. As a research institute base. But Cross-cultural Center, before all the centers, there was a Cross-Cultural Center that set the foundation for those to come. Ho: Um-hmm. Perez: So I would say to you that when you look at it, you'll see just the, the diversity, the tapestry of our community at the time. There's so many things in that mural. So you should go see it. So many things in that mural. Ho: Okay, thank you. (both talking) Perez: I haven't seen it in a few years, but definitely check the mural. 'Cause that we did that probably, maybe I came back in 2006, so maybe 2007, 2008. So that was about four years after we opened. So we're celebrating twenty years (of the CCC being open), right? I'm trying to think, is coming up. So we're, I came to the fifteen, I think he's (Floyd Lai) getting to twenty, so it's, so March, they should count March as kind of the opening, I'm guessing. Ho: Yeah, I think it is March. Perez: It was 2004. He's right, it was March 2004 when I started it. Yeah. Ho: Okay. Perez: So I think that that, that, that mural was really a great you know, I'm, I saw Chanel Bradley and um Gerardo Cabral, he, I'm sure some of the other folks, they're on Facebook and saw them. Diana Sal-Saldivar. I mean these were like the OGs of, and you know what I will tell you is I think that then for a while, students came and went like they were good and pivotal, right? But it was different when you were in the beginning. But I see Floyd recently 'cause I'm still on Facebook with some, and it's like, looks like they have a strong sense of community amongst the, the peer educators. And Floyd brought the interns. And so that has made the difference too especially with resources. I do remember as a director advocating for that space though. You know, I'm pretty proud of how we set that space up. There, there was a lot of political navigation in that and took, you know, a lot of collateral and 'cause you know, there people were vying for space, right? But we had a reputation. And in the negotiations, you see we did pretty good. We gave up some of the physical space on the inside to get the patio on the outside (laughs) like when you think there was a lot of strategy in, in the space and how we navigated those pieces. You gotta remember too – now you're bringing up all these memories for me – the, the Multicultural Programs was started with a lottery grant. Lottery. Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 21 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Ho: (unclear) mean? Perez: So lottery funds, we had to apply for lottery funds. And they were only supposed to be for like two to three years to get you started. So we had to write a lottery application to get it started, to get, to have funding, to have any programming money. Ho: Oh my goodness. I did not know that. Perez: And then I started making some interesting deals across campus to get other funds. Some we probably don't wanna record, but it got access to, to some, you know. And then, oh, and then before I left, I--oh, I forgot about this! So do you, do they still have co-curricular funds? The pro-- you can apply for co-curricular funds? Ho: I think so. Perez: I worked that deal. And so I had told Bridget (Blanshan), I was like, “We need to stop everybody from going all over getting funds. We need to get the funds.” And so by the time I came back, they had co-- Bridget had co-curricular funds. And so we had this process for co-curricular funds. And then Tukwut Life. This is outside. So in Tukwut Life, this, I did a deal with the president's office on Tukwut Life. 'Cause The president's husband came to me and said, “You need to start some campus traditions.” And so Tukwut Life was part of that. Ho: How did you, did you create Tukwut Life? Was that an original-Perez: With a whole bunch of people. We sure did. Absolutely. Tukwut Life. (both talking) Ho: That's awesome. Perez: We sure did. And I think it's died down a little bit since then, but oh, it was a whole movement. Oh. Ho: What was it? What was Tukwut Life? Perez: It was Friday night and weekend programming so that to make sure that we had night and weekend programs for students because we were increasing the number of residents and we didn't have a lot of community at the time, right? And so we knew we needed some community. Athletics was coming on board in a greater way than it was. And so, and so this is all, this is tangential to the CrossCultural Center. I don't know who I thought I was. I really don't. I think I just didn't ask permission. And we were just a different campus then. I don't know. I was telling someone the other day, I--I'm sure we had policies and procedures. I know we did. But I literally, one day when I was trying to create tradition on, you know, Tukwut Courtyard--I, you know, those stickers on the window, I was the first one to put all those stickers on the window. You know how it has the, oh. And then I plastered the stairs with, with CSU Gear. I had a professional company come out. I don't know who I asked. Like I was trying to think like, “Did you ask anyone? Like who told you you could do?” No, I was gonna create Tukwut Courtyard as a spirit courtyard. I, we held a Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 22 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 pep rally there. But literally I had stairs and, you know, we used to get, I get real happiness, students would come take pictures at commencement time with their family around those, those pictures, yeah. Ho: Um-Hm. Perez: And, but then I couldn't put the stickers up anymore 'cause the concrete's old. So then we had to get rid of them, so we couldn't do that anymore. So then I had to go think about something else. Umhmm. I don't know who I thought I was. I just need you to know. I like, now everything's so bureaucratic, right? No. We just did stuff, we did what we needed to do. Ho: Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you just have to not think about it and just do it. Perez: And I, the campus was gracious to me. I also wasn't doing dumb stuff. Right. I was doing things that, but I don't know where I—all of a sudden woke up one day and I was like, I couldn't, I'm hiring a company, put some stickers on some stairs. Ho: Yeah. (inaudible) Perez: But I think that with the Cross-Cultural Center, why it worked, is that I didn't have to always ask permission. I did--I knew what I was advocating for and the campus was gracious enough to entertain that. And I think I had enough credibility at that point that they trusted me. Ho: Yeah. I think so. Perez: I don't think everything's perfect. I probably could have documented stuff better. Literally like when I look at what Alexis did and you, I was like, I was, I was just doing the rah rah fun part. Getting it started. The sustaining it is the hard part, right? So I know what I've learned about myself as a professional. I'm great at starting things like I can get a vision going. Like Cross-Cultural Center that changed and redefined--I would not be here today had it not been for the work in Multicultural Programs (inaudible). I would not, it changed--that one decision to join that team changed the trajectory of my life and my career. Ho: That's really cool. Perez: I'm, I'm pretty grateful. Pretty, I am proud of the Cross-Culture Center. I'm proud of the way Floyd (Lai) has led it. I'm proud and I'm not trying to be funny. I'm proud it has stayed controversy free (laughs). I think it has done important work in really kind, meaningful relational ways. Floyd's out there doing DEIJ work, he just does it differently than someone that's out there yelling and screaming. His work that he's doing in that center, you look at what that center has done – as you are (laughs) – for the campus. He, he has that--each of the directors, I think has added and put their nuance and their flair on that center. And I'm internally grateful that 20 years later I am proud to be connected and associated with such great work. Ho: It really does feel like a center of, of love and acceptance. It's really a beautiful, a really beautiful place. And you can, you can see that from anybody that you, you talk to. They all love the Cross-Cultural Center. Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 23 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Perez: It is. And it really is. And he has just furthered that vision. Like we started with that. But the population, like you have to think, we only had, I don't know when I left, I don't even know, maybe 7,000 students at that, at the time when I left, you know, once. And then came back and we grew like in, you know, seven years to 15,000. That's, that center has stayed tried and true. Tried and true. So what that tells me is I, yeah, we set a great foundation but the folks that came thereafter have really done a magnificent job and created a legacy for that case. Sara Sheik, I think about what she added, you know, that's where the Social Justice Summit was started. We were all there. I don't know if they told you. We were sitting there and we felt like people were too much in their heads. Oh, they were just, they, it was outside of them. Outside of them. And we were like, no, no, no. I remember sitting on the swing there and we were like, we gotta do something. So then we created the exercise madder than Hell. Mad as Hell. And we wanted to get them to their hearts. And we did that exercise Mad as Hell. Scott Gross. Scott Gross and I started, Sara Sheikh came in, we created that Mad as Hell exercise. They're probably still not doing it 'cause it seemed like we had controversy at every Social Justice Summit. But we were doing that work with students. And honestly, I went through a training not too long ago and they were doing equity work and I was like, “Uh, we were doing this with students, like first-year students in 2005. And you're literally taking people through this right now? This is outdated work. What are talking about?” Then I think about the students at San Marcos? They were getting that in their first year. You tell me how much different and how transformative that would be for them coming out their senior year. Ho: Yeah. Perez: I'm inspired and moved. Ho: That's great. That's so awesome. Perez: You just made me excited about the Cross-Cultural Center even more. Ho: Wait, say that again? Perez: I said, “You just made me so excited about the Cross-Cultural Center.” Ho: I, I'm really happy and I feel like I'm supposed to wrap up this interview, but I'm afraid that you'll think of more great memories to share and things to say. I don't wanna cut us off. Perez: Yeah. Well here's the thing. I will let you know if some things come up that I think are important, I'll reach out to you and let you know. 'Cause I--I'm, I am so grateful that you all are doing this. I think it is a really critical part of San Marcos and its history. Not just as a center, but in DEIJ work. For sure. Ho: Absolutely. Yeah. And the stories from people who were there, who started these movements and experienced them and made them happen are really important. 'Cause they're not always documented on paper. Perez: Yeah. I didn't do that very well. And I'm sure others, (Ho laughs) we were, we were hustling. We were hustling for sure. Right. So, but we did it. Ho: That's great. Yeah. And we have the proof of it now, celebrating the anniversary coming up. Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 24 2024-01-26 �Dilcie Perez TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2023-05-30 Perez: That’s exciting. I'm excited for you. So, well, it's nice to meet you. I hope that we, I just did an official visit there a few months ago, but hope we have the chance to meet in person. Ho: I hope so too! Thank you Dr. Perez. I will go ahead and end the interview now. Perez: Wonderful. Transcribed by Geneva Martinot and Aaron Williams 25 2024-01-26 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Transcripts Description An account of the resource Written oral histories and transcripts are available for researchers that prefer the written word, or to see the whole interview in a document. Transcripts of <a href="https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/collections/show/5">audio and video files</a> are also available as part of those video files. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Perez, Dilcie. Interview transcription, May 30th, 2023. Description An account of the resource Dr. Dilcie Perez is Deputy Vice Chancellor, Academic and Student Affairs for the CSU, as well as a California State University San Marcos (CSUSM) alumna. She graduated with her degree in Bachelors of Arts in Political Science. In this interview, Perez explains how CSUSM was ahead of its time in regards to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) work; however at the beginning of her employment with CSUSM, the university did not have Multicultural Programs (the predecessor to the Cross-Cultural Center). Perez recalls her work with Multicultural Programs, including her being offered the opportunity to open the program upon tendering her resignation to the university. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dilcie Perez Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Ho Geneva Martinot Aaron Williams Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023-05-30 Subject The topic of the resource California State University San Marcos. Cross-Cultural Center California State University. Multicultural Programs California State University San Marcos. Student Academic Services Outreach Program California State University San Marcos. Student Affirmative Action Education, Higher Human rights Mural painting and decoration Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant San Marcos (Calif.) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Dilcie Perez License A legal document giving official permission to do something with the resource. Property rights reside with the university. Copyrights are retained by the creators of the records and their heirs. This resource is licensed for noncommercial educational use using CC NC-BY 4.0. Please contact Special Collections at archives@csusm.edu if you need reproductions made. Please see the related “Preferred Citation note” for language on citing materials from this collection. Permission to examine Library materials is not authorization to publish or to reproduce the examined material in whole, or in part. Persons wishing to quote, publish, perform, reproduce, or otherwise make use of an item in the Library’s collections must assume all responsibility for identifying and satisfying any claimants of the copyright holder. The researcher assumes full responsibility for use of the material and agrees to hold harmless the University Library, and California State University, against all claims, demands, costs, and expenses incurred by copyright infringement or any other legal or regulatory cause of action arising from the use of the Library's materials. In assuming full responsibility for use of the material, the researcher also understands that the materials they examine may contain Social Security numbers, other personal identifiers, and/or sensitive material on potentially living and identifiable individuals (e.g., medical, evaluative, or personally invasive information). The researcher agrees not to record, reproduce, or disclose any Social Security number or other information of a highly personal nature that may be found. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SC027-43 Cross-Cultural Center oral history project CSUSM history Women's experience Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral Histories Description An account of the resource Video and audio oral histories can be viewed here. Histories are listed alphabetically by last name. Individual histories are indexed and transcribed and can be searched. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <p>Rights to oral histories vary depending on the history. The library owns the copyright to some histories, and has license to reproduce for nonprofit purposes for others. Please contact CSUSM University Library Special Collections at <a href="mailto:%20archives@csusm.edu">archives@csusm.edu</a> with any questions about use.</p> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Riccardo Savo Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dinah Poellnitz OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PoellnitzDinah_SavoRiccardo_2023-04-05.xml OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 SC027 Poellnitz, Dinah. Interview April 5, 2023. SC027-025 1:06:11 SC027 California State University San Marcos Library Special Collections Oral History Collection CSUSM This oral history was made possible with the generous funding of the Ellie Johns Scholarship Fund at Rancho Santa Fe Foundation and the Library Guild of Rancho Santa Fe. Art -- Study and teaching Art galleries -- nonprofit Artists, Black Community Engagement Hill Street Country Club -- California -- Oceanside Los Angeles (Calif.) Oceanside (Calif.) Vista (Calif.) Dinah Poellnitz Riccardo Savo Audio PoellnitzDinah_SavoRiccardo_2023-04-05 1:|12(18)|22(4)|33(2)|44(5)|57(13)|67(4)|77(15)|88(4)|102(14)|114(6)|130(6)|140(4)|150(11)|161(15)|173(4)|183(11)|196(7)|209(3)|220(15)|233(1)|245(3)|255(12)|265(16)|277(11)|287(10)|298(7)|310(4)|320(3)|333(12)|343(18)|354(1)|366(9)|376(1)|386(1)|397(2)|407(17)|424(2)|432(13)|442(5)|454(1)|463(7)|474(1)|485(3)|497(13)|508(2)|518(4)|531(5)|542(11)|553(12)|567(11)|578(4)|595(10)|605(12)|616(9)|627(5)|638(15)|648(10)|660(4)|668(10)|680(5)|690(5)|701(13)|710(8)|722(3)|736(6)|750(8) 0 https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/files/original/4344d88bc2e671e3ad4b1f4ea85cfba8.wav Other audio English 40 Interest in Art and How Art Relates to Community Engagement Poellnitz discusses how she initially was exposed to art at the age of 11, where she began to take up drawing through a family friend. drafting material ; drawing ; North County ; Oceanside 216 High School and the 1990s Dinah Poellnitz describes how her interest in art coincided with the development and mainstreaming of hip-hip during the 1990s. She mentions how she was drawn to the expressionist element that art represented. dance ; hip-hop ; Oceanside,CA ; Vista,CA 246 Self-Engagement with Art Dinah Poellnitz elaborates on how her interest in fashion and making her own dresses instilled her creativity in making art with intention. She mentions her time at Santa Monica College where she got to see firsthand how art could be used as a language to communicate, organize, and protest. art intentionality ; fashion ; Santa Monica College ; Soul Train 508 Art History and University of California, Riverside Dinah Poellnitz discusses how her networking in college at both Santa Monica College and UC Riverside helped to expose her to the business part of art. Poellnitz decided to double major in art history and art administration to learn what it means to operate a studio gallery and exhibit. Amy Goodman ; Intentionality ; Politics ; Santa Monica College 606 Getting a Job in the Art Industry Dinah Poellnitz discusses more broadly how she transitioned from her initial job positions in Los Angeles, CA to San Diego's North County. Beginning with the Oceanside Museum of Art, Poellnitz's experience in volunteering with youth led to learning about civic engagement and city planning. Primarily, she focuses on the challenges and inequities that she observed amongst Black children who had no prior engagement with art materials and what it means to be an artist. Hill Street Country Club ; inequity ; Los Angeles ; North County ; Oceanside Museum of Art ; Vista, CA 1196 Artist Networking in San Diego and Oceanside Dinah Poellnitz mentions how her idea to create the Hill Street Country Club came from the contacts that she developed with other local artists in Oceanside. In particular, she recalls an instance she met the owner of the Link-Soul art space, Jeff Cunningham, who provided her with the opportunity to create a space of her own. Art Exhibitions ; Link-Soul ; Oceanside Education Department ; Oceanside Museum of Art 1546 The Networking and Structuring of the Hill Street Country Club Dinah Poellnitz elaborate on the two primary contacts that assisted in her founding of the Hill Street County Club. Jeff Cunningham ; Julia Fister ; Studio Ace Art Gallery 1652 Hill Street Country Club Art Exhibit and Activism Dinah Poellnitz discusses the challenges in funding that came in comparison to other local exhibits in the North County. Specifically, Poellnitz elaborates on how the Hill Street Country Club's artists all share similar outlooks on the art industry and how their work is a critique of social inequities. autonomy ; inequity ; microaggression ; social impact 2017 Hill Street Country Club and the Pandemic Dinah Poellnitz provides insight to how Hill Street Country Club had to adapt to the changes brought on by the 2020 pandemic and remain open despite other exhibits closing their doors. 2020 pandemic ; mental health 2222 The Economic Hardships of the Pandemic within the Art Community Dinah Poellnitz offers an insight on the effects that the traumatic events of police brutality had on those within the Black art community. Poellnitz reflects on the general mood and tone of the Oceanside community during the initial months of the pandemic. community conversations ; empathy ; liberation ; resources ; solidarity 2448 Changes in both Activism and Structure Dinah Poellnitz briefly mentions how Hill Street had to evolve over the course of the pandemic, providing the creative space to assist in the mental health crisis that developed over the course of 2020. group therapy ; Oceanside Unified School District ; The Social 2724 Oceanside Unified School District and Group Therapy for Middle School Children Dinah Poellnitz goes into detail discussing how Hill Street offered children from Jefferson Middle School group therapy sessions to handle with the stress from the pandemic. She elaborates on the lengths that Hill Street had to change to adhere to COVID protocols with social distancing and interaction. cohorts ; COVID-19 ; Jefferson Middle School ; social camp 3065 The Community Reception to Hill Street's Restructuring and Outreach Dinah Poellnitz describes how Hill Street became a model of inspiration during the pandemic for other exhibits to follow. She offers the reception that Hill Street received from the local community for their initiatives with the Oceanside Unified School District. budget ; gallery space ; impact ; influence 3512 The Future of the Hill Street County Club Dinah Poellnitz provides the vision that she hopes for the Hill Street Country Club, primarily the creation of a Community School. While much of this vision has not been enacted, Poellnitz offers some of the challenges that would come in the face of creating a K-12 community school. bigger institution ; community school ; organizations ; partnerships wav Oral History Interview of Dinah Poellnitz on April 5, 2023. Video briefly discusses Dinah Poellnitz’s community engagement within the city of Oceanside through art. In particular, the interview focuses on Poellnitz's involvement in the founding of the Hill Street Country Club art gallery in Oceanside, CA. Poellnitz discusses how to navigate through the art community as a Black woman, emphasizing the importance of equity and inclusion. Riccardo Savo: Awesome. Alright, so today is April 5th, 2023. I am Riccardo Savo, a graduate student at California State University of San Marcos. I&#039 ; m interviewing Dinah Poellnitz for the University Library Special Collections Oral Project. Thank you so much for being here with me today. Unfortunately, you&#039 ; re not able to have the video, so we&#039 ; ll just rely on audio today, which is perfectly fine. And I would like to begin quite broadly if we can, if you could tell me how you became interested in art and how you initially related it to the community or to community engagement. Dinah Poellnitz: Um, then that&#039 ; s like a childhood memory question for me. I&#039 ; m from North County. My dad came to Oceanside Camp Pendleton in the seventies. I was born in [19]76. I think my dad came out here in [19]78 and we lived on base and if you know anything about North County during that time, it was like, you go to church, you watch sports... and that was it, you know? And my mom&#039 ; s from the South. She&#039 ; s from Louisiana and you know, my mom&#039 ; s about church and we used to go to church all the time. And my mom had a friend named Carla. She was like a wacky woman too. She was just elusive, like all over the place. She used to be an architect and she saw that I loved to draw. And so one day she just gave me her drafting table and I was, I could, I think I was like in -- 11 years-old -- and she brought all her materials and stuff to my house and I was just like, whaaaat? It was like a whole new world. I was just like, wait... there&#039 ; s a table made just for drawing? That happens? You know, it was like one of those moments. And I used to dr-- I wanted to be a costume designer, so I used to draw dresses and fashion all the time on that table. And I had a whole setup. But I just remember just being this little kid who had my own little like, workspace and, and it was just for me to draw. And I was like, wow, there&#039 ; s a, there&#039 ; s... you could do this. Like, this is not a like day, you know, day drawing at home. This like, you could really do this as a, like, as an adult. So yeah, I was maybe like 11 and it was Carla from Fresh Bread Church. &lt ; laughter&gt ; Savo: That&#039 ; s awesome. So, you began this at age 11 and did you carry this through to your high school? Because I know you attended UC [University of California] Riverside and earned your Bachelor&#039 ; s in art history. Poellnitz: Yeah, I did. You know, like I was a kid that always made my own. Like I made my own. I designed dresses. I made my own prom dress. I sewed it, I wore it. I was heavily into -- It was the nineties in high school. And so, my parents, my dad retired, and then we moved outta Oceanside and moved to Vista for my high school years. And... it was hip-hop era, so I was like into dance and music. So that was all part of art and expression. But I remember wanting to be in the art clubs and I was just like, I can&#039 ; t if that, if art club&#039 ; s about realism and like drawing like things perfectly, I don&#039 ; t have time for that. That&#039 ; s real. I was just like, I don&#039 ; t even, I&#039 ; m not even curious to learn that. I don&#039 ; t wanna do that. Cause that&#039 ; s what art club was defined as in high school for me. Savo: So would you say that your engagement was more self-disciplined? It was more geared towards how you wanted to engage with it, or more or less, how you could find avenues to apply it? Poellnitz: Um, it was more intentional for me. You know, I like fashion, so I drew. I drew dresses and I designed a dress and I sewed a dress and I wore it. It was just, it was all intentional. It was like just being, it was an action, it was a language for me. It was... it was a skill, you know, I just thought very creatively all the time. Even when I was learning economics, I was thinking about it creatively so it can make sense for me. I think they say that artists are like divergent thinkers, you know? We always find or create and build and make an alternative solution to solve a problem in art. So that&#039 ; s kind of like that, that&#039 ; s a habit. Um, yeah, &#039 ; cause in, in high school, I used to go dancing. I used to go to like, this is corny as hell: I used to skip school and go to the Soul Train and dance in Soul Train in High School. I was just expressive. It was a very creative, like moment as a kid for me being in high school in the nineties, like hip hop was like jazzy like baggy and like there was more Black designers like Dubbo jeans and FUBU and all that stuff came out. So it was kinda like a Renaissance era, even though I lived in, in a little North County and, you know, Blacks were a smaller percent of the community. There&#039 ; s like, that culture was just present when I was in high school. So me not wanting-- Me not wanting to join like the art club for high school and draw something perfectly was just like, eh, I can have fun. That feels like studying for economics. I don&#039 ; t wanna do that right now. I wanna enjoy creativity right now. I don&#039 ; t wanna study it. I was not in that mood. It was just a part of my life, you know? So... and then I used to go to LA every summer when I was in high school to get away from North County and stay with my cousins who worked at movie theaters. And that&#039 ; s when I was exposed to like museums and galleries and, you know, and I took a class at Santa Monica College and that&#039 ; s when I learned like, oh snap, you can learn art history? This is more interesting than like actually drawing the horse, you know? Um, I just learned that art had intentions all the time. Like I was, I was also like poor, you know? And I&#039 ; m a, I come from a Black family, so to venture off into art, it&#039 ; s just like: you gotta make sure it makes money! My uncle in LA is like, what are you getting a degree in? Are you gonna be able to teach with that? I&#039 ; m just like, hmm, I don&#039 ; t know, you know, and, but I enjoy it and I excelled at it. And like, I had a teacher, I took like Japanese art history at Santa Monica College, and I was just blown away by the history, like the political history, the social impact, just like everything that you see in art, like how it&#039 ; s a reflection of like moments of history or just moments of inequity. I thought that was very interesting how artists could use that as a language to communicate, to organize, to protest, to be expressive of what they don&#039 ; t like in society. So yeah, I loved art history and that was like perfect for me. Cause when I think about it, I was into dance and music, hip-hop culture because it felt liberating. I designed and made my own prom dress because, you know, it gave me ownership. And those are like human right feelings. Savo: And speaking to that, about the ownership and the intentionality, your decision to do art history as a degree and as a major, was that a choice that you made? Was that a choice that you had made from Santa Monica to UC Riverside? Poellnitz: Mm-hmm Savo: OK- Poellnitz: It was intentional. Yeah. So I, when I was at Santa Monica, it was cool. I had a lot of friends and they were like all into politics. I saw Amy Goodman when I went to Santa Monica College. And so I had a lot of friends who were into like, the political and social justice part of education. And I was like, I wanna do art history. &lt ; laughs&gt ; I like it. I like pictures, I like reading-- images, I love that. I love telling, retelling those stories or using it as a form of communication. But I was like, I think I wanna-- I remember telling myself in our junior college, I wanted to have a gallery space. It was intentional. And I applied to all the schools that had the double major art history and art administrative &#039 ; cause I wanted to learn the business side and the admin part. I didn&#039 ; t know what I was gonna do. I didn&#039 ; t know I was gonna get the gallery, but I was like, &quot ; Hey, if I wanna work in a gallery, I need to have these skills or just to better understand it.&quot ; &#039 ; Cause I have to justify going to school for art history, not just to my family but to myself. Savo: And so you mentioned that you wanted this applicability, you know to translate the skills that you learned in your degree to, to real life and to getting a job. Poellnitz: Yeah to a job--. Savo: Could you tell me a little broadly about your experience with that community engagement and, and political activism and how that helped formulate what is now, you know, the Hill Street Country Club because it&#039 ; s a great gallery in Oceanside and you don&#039 ; t really think about Oceanside being, uh, very cultural. At least you know, the North County, South Bay, in terms of San Diego County in general. But how did that come about? Poellnitz: Um, well I finished school, lived in L.A. for quite a bit. Played assistant nanny manager, like these jobs separate from what I wanted to go to school for because I was living in L.A and I had to learn how to multitask. And I took on like a lot of assistant jobs and one day I was just like, I was working for lie celebrities and like producers and stuff and you know, I saw how things were operating behind the scene creatively for money. And then I also understood the realities of like creating for me and the possibilities. And so, you know, I always kept a job and one day I decided, like me, my husband, we split [up] and me and my little kid, we moved back to North County and I still had my L.A job. So, I was still commuting like three to four times a week from Vista to L.A for my job. Cause they paid me well. But I decided to start volunteering at the Oceanside Museum of Art and their education department, but they didn&#039 ; t have one yet. So, I ended up volunteering with the proprietors. I learned about installation at Oceanside Museum of Art and I was still, I still had my like feet in two different worlds. I was still in the L.A world, but also in my hometown world. I did work at Patricia Korea Gallery in Santa Monica, and that was a very eye-opening experience at the&lt ; inaudible&gt ; was in college. Just, she was like the only woman of color, like gallery owner. And she only represented brown artists at the time, which was very &lt ; inaudible&gt ; in Santa Monica. Well, but inequity in like the gallery world when I was in college with that job, I would apply to like the Getty and all types of museums when I lived in L.A. with my friends. But my friends would always get the job even though I had a better CV than them. You know you just accept it. And so I just went back to like doing assistant work and then I decided, I was like, you know what, like I&#039 ; m gonna lean a little heavy. Like now that I&#039 ; m back in Vista, I&#039 ; m gonna lean in a little bit more in North County and invest more of my time there. And so that&#039 ; s when I started volunteering at OMA [Oceanside Museum of Art]. Then I learned about the infrastructure of the museum world because, you know, I always wanted to work in a museum. I always thought museums were an amazing place to tell stories and educate. I never knew about the dark side of museums, you know, like how they get art and how they flip art and also like the politics of like hierarchy and institutions, you know, I learned-- I didn&#039 ; t know about that in school. No one ever talked about that in school. We only talked about art history. But once I started volunteering and then turned into a paid position at Oceanside Museum of Art, I learned about institutions really quickly, and I also learned not just about art institutions, but I also learned about like civic engagement and city planning because, I still had my, my foot in L.A so I was used to going to galleries and museums and seeing public art, having friends who got paid as full-time artists or had very creative jobs. I know what&#039 ; s possible. And so, you know, being back home, I just like, &quot ; okay, why don&#039 ; t we have public art again.&quot ; And then I had to like learn beyond what school taught me through experiences. Like, oh, public art is political and it&#039 ; s not, political is a message, it&#039 ; s political because you have to politically know how to create a system so that there can be public arts, right? At the time OMA, no one knew Oceanside Museum of Art exists. You know, 12 years ago no one knew. I didn&#039 ; t even know. I like googled and like looked for art spaces and I somehow, and only because I was intentionally looking for art space in North County, close to home, I found it. But it wasn&#039 ; t like it was vibrant and it was attracting people like me and they should be attracting people like me for living in LA and loving art. I didn&#039 ; t know it exists out of Google art spaces in North County. And that&#039 ; s how Oceanside using a popped up. And I noticed that they didn&#039 ; t have an education department. They had Julia Fister who was volunteering for the education department that she created as a volunteer because she had a big grant with Target to make sure every fifth grader goes to the museum. But she didn&#039 ; t have a office space or studio room for education. It was like she just came and sat at a table and made it happen and fifth graders came. And me and my business partner, Margaret Hernandez, we just decided, you know, we were both in education and we did all the docent tours with the fifth graders and the, and the workshops with them. And we just like had a lot of community conversations with young people, people in middle school, so you learned about their like starting point to art, who in the, in the classroom who visit[ed] that day, who had more access to art than others. Who had materials, who been to museum. You know, you learn so much about the demographics and like, I&#039 ; m sorry but the demographics were pretty like astounding when you see majority of the Brown/Black kids saying this is their first time. You know. Or you have students ask you if they could take home some of the like, crayons or pastels at home so they can keep drawing. You&#039 ; re just like, dang, kids don&#039 ; t have like crayons? Like how do you not have crayons? You know it-- Or kids asking like, or the one kid who&#039 ; s just like, who knows about art but like, how do artists even make money? Like kids would ask those questions all the time. How do artists even make money? Like what do art, what can artists do? You know? And those were conversations for me &#039 ; cause I was always intentional. I was just like artists designed your shirt, the artist probably designed like a machine that&#039 ; s in the hospital that you are using, artists design buildings. I&#039 ; m like, art is involved in literally your whole life. You just don&#039 ; t know it. And you probably could have more, but you just don&#039 ; t know it. Right? And so I just started asking questions about how do we get more murals? How do we get public art? How do we have art walk? And I learned that I had to like volunteer with like Main Street, like a commerce type of org, who had a relationship with the city to get extra funding for projects for the city. I had to learn about that dynamic. I learned about putting things on the docket. Like I learned how art was, wasn&#039 ; t just like creative, but it was also political and it was also like [it] required you to engage in the system to understand how to create public art opportunities. You know, it&#039 ; s just, we didn&#039 ; t, Oceanside didn&#039 ; t have an infrastructure for art. Like we&#039 ; ve made a lot of improvement, but we didn&#039 ; t have an infrastructure, we had an arts commission, but it was it was in silo and they weren&#039 ; t funding anything and they were just meeting each other, talking about projects around town, you know? The museum wasn&#039 ; t engaged at the time. It was, it was treated more like a private gallery space than a public space. And it was, &#039 ; cause you know, Oceanside Museum of Art is not owned by the city. It&#039 ; s owned by a group of retirees, you know, and there&#039 ; s a lot there. There&#039 ; s also the retirement culture that you have to deal with. Like when we started Hill Street, we were very engaged with our friends and our family and community members. And we worked with people who couldn&#039 ; t get a space or an exhibition. We worked with those artists and they brought their family and friends. Like, it was a gathering opportunity for people. It made sense. Savo: And how were you able to attract these different artists? Were these artists specifically located in Oceanside or were they spread out through across San Diego County? Poellnitz: No it started in Oceanside. It was our friends first. We grew like a concentric circle, if that makes any sense. It was, um, we fit Hill Street like artist, personal, communal, universal. And like this, if I think about how we grew as a concentric circle, it was very personal for me, Marj, to begin Hill Street Country Club because the museum was rejecting all our ideas and they were not being cool or like easily invested in education. They made it very hard for Oceanside Museum of Art to create an education department at the time. And so in support of an education department, because we, you know, we did those docents and we listened to young people. So I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; you need an education department. It&#039 ; s necessary.&quot ; We supported Julia and her vision to make an education department for the museum. And we tried to throw our first fundraiser for that vision of hers. And the museum would say no to us. Like, we&#039 ; re like, &quot ; Hey, can we do a fundraiser for the education department?&quot ; And they&#039 ; re like, no. And then we&#039 ; re asked like, &quot ; Can we borrow some chairs and tables for a fundraiser?&quot ; &quot ; Uh, not right now. No.&quot ; And basically like we knew we need an education department like, Oceanside, if you&#039 ; re gonna have Oceanside Museum of Art and you&#039 ; re taking up the city&#039 ; s name and you&#039 ; re having fifth graders come in and you&#039 ; re getting grant money, you need to have an education department, right? And that&#039 ; s just common sense to us. And so we told all our friends the idea of having a fundraiser for the Oceanside Museum of Arts Education Department to support Julia. And one day I was like driving home to dinner to meet Margaret and I saw that the Link-Soul building light was on and they were having a gallery show. And I walked in there and I was just like, this is the art space? And Jeff, who is the co-owner of Link-Soul was just like, yeah. And I was like, this is interesting. I was just so shocked to see a gallery that had a show. And the next day I went over there and met Jeff, someone got him, and I introduced myself and I pitched our fundraiser idea. He, like, he said yes to me, to like using this space for free. And so that was our first event that we organized, and it was called &quot ; Open to the Public&quot ; and it was about, you know, the need for art education. It was a fundraiser for OMA. And so, we just asked all our friends who were artists in North County and then like people who I went to school with, &#039 ; cause I was taking classes at Miracosta for fun, for art and asking teachers to support it. We had a big turnout, and we were able to donate to the education department and purchase art materials and bags for every fifth grader of Oceanside for that year that visited the museum on that program. So that was like the first time where we were just like, wait, this was successful. People are thirsty. Like it&#039 ; s not just us who want [to] have more like community opportunities, you know, with art. So like I said, it&#039 ; s like we grew a concentric circle because we started off very, it was very personal for us to do that. And then once we had our first event, we understood the like community purpose. Like, oh this is not just us, this is a community issue too. We want, we want more opportunities to do stuff like this and we don&#039 ; t have it. It was like, &quot ; I want more of this. Like how do we, how do we keep doing this?&quot ; And so me, Margaret, just because we couldn&#039 ; t afford our own space and I still working back and forth in L.A, we just did pop-up art shows for like two solid years all over Oceanside. And then we went to community art events or like art events in San Diego because they had more of a presence of art for us back then, &#039 ; cause we weren&#039 ; t really doing much as a city. So, we would go to events and openings in San Diego all the time. I don&#039 ; t know, it was this became very like, personal and communal. And then most of our artists are like working class, queer, young, old, um, more vulnerable, you know, and to like, to all kinds of things. And so, like most of them never had an opportunity to have an exhibition. They like paint it for themselves or put their art in a store, but no one&#039 ; s ever invited them to do an exhibition. And we would just invite artists for exhibition. But it was a curated experience, you know, and a lot of it was just, we choose artists that, that we shared messages with. I don&#039 ; t know, it just became a very organic growth. Savo: This is excellent to learn about. &#039 ; Cause I didn&#039 ; t know that there&#039 ; s so much underneath, in terms of the layering, in terms of structuring, in terms of networking that&#039 ; s involved. Could you just clarify briefly who exactly Jeff and Julia are in relation to the Hill Street Country Club? Poellnitz: So Julia Fister at the time was the education director at the Oceanside Museum of Art. And she was one of my- me and Margaret&#039 ; s mentor. She now owns Studio Ace in Oceanside where it&#039 ; s focused on youth and like art education, which is really cool cause she&#039 ; s in the valley. Very much needed over there. And then Jeff, Jeff Cunningham is a artist but is the creative director for Link -Soul, which is a golf apparel company. Their design team is based in downtown San Diego. And we share, we co-op a space with them. That&#039 ; s where we have our gallery. And Jeff Cunningham is a phenomenal artist. Like I curated him for a show for Oceanside Museum of Art. And our friendship, just like it grew from like me being a curator and an artist and him being an artist and us really like exchanging ideas about social impact and how do we create an art space that&#039 ; s different, that&#039 ; s more authentic and doesn&#039 ; t have all these pressures to over-perform, be productive. And so like, it&#039 ; s natural. It&#039 ; s interesting &#039 ; cause he said yes to us having our first art show at his space and then he ended up giving us this space for Hill Street. Savo: That&#039 ; s awesome. And since Hill Street has been open and been around in the community, how has the gallery become that space where it&#039 ; s not just the ideas or expressions that are being presented, but how has that space become a platform really, sorry... How has that space become a platform for activism? Because, you know, you noted in a 2020 interview with KPBS that art is a functioning tool that should transition off the canvas. Poellnitz: Hmm-hmm. Savo: How has Hill Street Country Club played in that part? Poellnitz: You know, it&#039 ; s so funny cause every time I get asked like, &quot ; oh are you an artist too?&quot ; Like,&quot ; yeah, I&#039 ; m an artist, I make work, but I don&#039 ; t make it anymore.&quot ; I was like, I make, I build art, you know, I can build stuff. But right now, my art is Hill Street Country Club, and you know, it&#039 ; s, it goes back to college and me like learning about all like the social impact and inequities in the world through art history. It goes back to that. And it goes back to like, you know, artists are some of the most vulnerable people because first of all, you&#039 ; re not respected with pay whatsoever, &#039 ; cause you have to remember like, I knew I had to get paid to do this or I shouldn&#039 ; t be doing it. I should be like a teacher or an engineer or a therapist. Like, you went to school for art and people need to get paid for that. So we live, we live in North County where there&#039 ; s, we were spending like 10 cents per residence on art funding while like San Diego at the time was spending ten dollars. So, and then also trying to convince older peers in the art community that they had to pay for admin stuff that we organized. And then thinking that everyone had time to volunteer because at the end of the day, we had a large retirement class that was in charge of the art community in Oceanside and Vista. You know, they didn&#039 ; t see the value of paying younger people to help them with the arts, you know, there&#039 ; s uh cultural differences. And that being said, you know, to get paid is not just like, to get paid is the equity issue, right? And then not only to get, you know, to get paid is the equity issue. And if you&#039 ; re like Black and people don&#039 ; t even take you that, if you look at the museum stats and gallery stats for like, artists and like people who make it, you already know. You&#039 ; re like, you&#039 ; re dealing with so many microaggressions, you&#039 ; re dealing with some unresolved supremacy issues. Like I always tell folks like, hey, check this out. Like, um, it&#039 ; s okay if you&#039 ; re racist, I get it. You&#039 ; re not me. You don&#039 ; t have these experiences and you have to unlearn and I&#039 ; m gonna give you grace to unlearn, but I&#039 ; m always gonna speak up for what I-- what you did. And I&#039 ; m gonna not call you out, but I&#039 ; m just gonna call you in and say like, &quot ; hey you know what you did was kind of racist could you not do that?&quot ; And I learned that was always like a threat to people when I was honest and like gave them grace at the same time. And I learned in the art community that they&#039 ; re not ready for those conversations at all. Or like, just to like unlearn and do better. So, but because I have ownership of my space and I don&#039 ; t work for anyone and I don&#039 ; t have a board that disagrees with my politics, I have a lot more autonomy than a lot of my artist friends or my art admins who work in museums and high-end gallery spaces. And so I get to embrace artists that are political, who are in the streets, who are organizing, who are building different collectives or opportunities for relief or whatever they believe in. I have a beautiful space. I also share my autonomy with them and I support their work. And because I believe in equity too. Cause I&#039 ; m trying to get paid, I&#039 ; m dealing with microaggressions. This is personal. Like what, what affects you is affecting me. And also, I&#039 ; m like, I just don&#039 ; t like people being in pain. I&#039 ; m an empathetic person. I, I don&#039 ; t know, I&#039 ; m pretty radical politically, so I have to-- if I have my own autonomy, I&#039 ; m gonna use it. I&#039 ; m not gonna shy away from that. And the artists that I admire were doing that. It went that I was learning art history. They were telling a story, they was telling us how wrong this was and that was. Like, they&#039 ; re pointing out problems and they&#039 ; re doing it in the nuances of art. And I think it&#039 ; s very important for artists to tell those stories so people can gather and discuss and find solutions or to just build creative- what is it critical mass? No, I think it&#039 ; s critical mass is like valuable, once you learn it&#039 ; s not just yourself. It&#039 ; s like a Power in Numbers game. Savo: Would you say that speaking to it&#039 ; s a power in numbers game, do you think that that has changed your perspective on the, the personal communal and universal experience that Hill Street Country Club offers? Because obviously since it&#039 ; s opened, now since the pandemic 2020, do you think that it&#039 ; s become a situation where art more than ever needs to be more expressionist or more, um, as you say, it has to be more, you know--? Poellnitz: Yeah,-Savo: It has to be more- Poellnitz: It should be. It should be. You know I was just talking to my colleague Astrid Gonzalez, she is one of the Hill Street colleagues. She does all our audio-visual stuff. And she was reflecting the other day and she was like, &quot ; we really never stopped working during the pandemic.&quot ; I was like, we didn&#039 ; t, we couldn&#039 ; t afford to. We&#039 ; re vulnerable. We don&#039 ; t have board members with money. We don&#039 ; t have-- like the reason why we can do all that we do is because we have people aligned with our principals who agree with us and who are not scared support what we&#039 ; re doing. But at the same time, to get paid in this art world, you gotta have some like, dirty person on your board. That&#039 ; s just reality. Like, you gotta think money. And it&#039 ; s, that&#039 ; s just how it works. It&#039 ; s an institution. Like every institution in America has flaws, right? And during the pandemic, we stayed open. We were very creative of finding creative ways to stay open and accessible to our audience and to our artists. Cause a lot of my artists during the pandemic were dealing with poverty, food, needed food, like, mental health. The pandemic was messing people up in the first like two years. And a lot of my artists were affected by that. I worked with a lot of Brown and Queer and old artists, you know, and in this economy, they were suffering. And so, I had to figure out how to be a safe space and use my space for opportunities for people to get access to food or help folks get access to mental health services or even a distraction like coming, making art. I had to stay open for two and a half years during the pandemic, while a lot of big museums were closing and doing bare minimum because they didn&#039 ; t wanna get Covid. So, I don&#039 ; t know, my space has always evolved and adapt, because it has to. Savo: Speaking to- Poellnitz: Right now--Go ahead- Savo: Oh no, go ahead. Poellnitz: I forgot what I was going to say, go ahead. Savo: Speaking to the space having evolved, you mentioned that Hill Street became a space that allowed for those economic hardships of the pandemic, to kind of be alleviated for your artists. Could you speak about the political upheaval? Because we all lived through 2020 and we all know how painful it was during April, May, April through June of 2020. How did that come about? How was Hill Street a space for comfort, a space for expression? Poellnitz: Yeah, that was interesting. Cause like I&#039 ; m the only like Black gallery owner in San Diego. And I&#039 ; ve been doing this for so long that I, I belong to extended part of the San Diego art community that a lot of folks don&#039 ; t see in North County. Like I know a lot of people in museums and galleries and stuff like that. And I know a lot of people in City government and Federal government. And so, you know, during that time it was just like, this is when you make art. This is when you talk about these issues and you use art as a language and as a tool to have these community conversations. But also, this was also opportunity for us to do mutual aid. We went into care mode, like how do we care more about people? Like how do we care back? Like how do we take care of each other? Because during that time we know who&#039 ; s not taking care of us, we know who doesn&#039 ; t protect us. And it was more like being available to protect and provide care. I kind of miss those days. Those were the days where we were talking about liberation and how to use resources to create safe, safer communities. We were talking about solutions for the first time out loud as a public. We were sharing empathy with each other. I thought it was a beautiful opportunity for us to build something new. But it was also beautiful to see that we could be in solidarity. I had people who knew me in the business community of Oceanside, but never went to our events. Always knew what I was doing if I went into their store or their restaurant or coffee shop or whatever. And that was the first time a lot of those folks came out and donated to us. &lt ; laughs&gt ; You know, like checked on us. And I was like, &quot ; Wow, this is the first-time people cared about what we are doing over here. Like, this is interesting.&quot ; And I think there was a fear for a lot of folks like &quot ; I hope this isn&#039 ; t discourage her.&quot ; Or maybe I&#039 ; m just thinking that in my head, I don&#039 ; t know. But I did see a lot of people come out the woodworks who started supporting us. And it gave us funding to create more programming and we kept going. So, I don&#039 ; t know. I was just adapting. I think that&#039 ; s what you do when you&#039 ; re in survival mode all the time. Savo: And since the pandemic, obviously the adapting to the circumstance and situation, have there been any local projects or exhibits that you&#039 ; ve, partaken in or helped organize that reflect those changing structures or those change in activism? Cause you mentioned a lot about talking about solutions and you mentioned how there&#039 ; s this real need for concern for one another, this care for one another. Has there been any of these projects that reflect that? Poellnitz: Yeah so we got really involved during the pandemic. We created like a mental health like group therapy program for young middle school kids, &quot ; The Social,&quot ; and it was just like, we had a license. We have a licensed therapist, one of our artists, and it&#039 ; s like a group therapy through art, but also peer on peer because a lot of young folks were isolated from each other during the pandemic. And they&#039 ; re still coping with, you know the environment they had to live in, to stay away from everyone and not getting us sick to die. That&#039 ; s kind of traumatic. And then we&#039 ; re asking them to like, go back to normal real quick so we can jumpstart our economy. So we created a program, &quot ; The Social,&quot ; with the therapist for young people. And now we&#039 ; re gonna be part of the Oceanside Unified School District programming for summer, fall, and winter, I mean summer, fall and spring now. So we&#039 ; re now like, we created a program that&#039 ; s gonna be in the school system that provides mental healthcare for young people who need it the most. And then we just recently had an exhibition with &lt ; inaudible&gt ; Roca Gonzalez, who lives in Oceanside, who&#039 ; s from Puerto Rico. And they&#039 ; re working about all these social issues and we&#039 ; re coming together and recognizing we are a product of gentrification and colonialism. We live through it every single day. Like we have all this architectural vernacular that reminds us that we&#039 ; re all living through this. It&#039 ; s not just Puerto Rico, you know, it&#039 ; s everywhere. We&#039 ; re all surviving. I&#039 ; ve been able to sit on a lot of committees and boards and be part of more equitable decision making for artists that I&#039 ; m excited about that&#039 ; s gonna be coming out soon with the city of San Diego, helping a lot of like artists get access to money. That was like one thing that I did during the pandemic, was I did sign up on committees and boards because I&#039 ; m just like, &quot ; You guys are making this process way too difficult for people who have to work full-time jobs and take care of family.&quot ; Not everyone&#039 ; s out here just being an artist on retirement mode and can fill out all these questions and type all these like, letters of intent. You gotta make this more equitable-like process for like poor people with very limited time, you know? So it was part of a San Diego artist project that raised like $150K for artists in San Diego. And we made the process so easy that a lot more like trans and BIPOC artists actually applied and received funding to be a artist over the pandemic. That was amazing. I mean once I decided I was committed to equity and inclusion for myself, everything I do affects everyone. As a Black woman, it just does naturally, like we&#039 ; re-- The stats prove it. If you improve my life or if you improve my life in your surrounding, you benefit from it. Like literally, like if Dinah says she wants more vacation days, I work too much and because I, and I don&#039 ; t normally give vacation day. Oh my God, imagine if you give it to me, you&#039 ; re gonna have to give it to my coworker. Not everything I want, everything I need because equity benefits everyone. So I understand a lot of my personal experience or communal experiences and has universal like means that needs &lt ; inaudible&gt ; . Savo: And I was just curious, because we were speaking about these different programs and different committees that were happening during the pandemic. Before we jump back to the equity portion that I&#039 ; m really fascinated to know more about, how were these committees and how were these programs organized? Were they all organized remotely? Were these children or these group therapy sessions that you mentioned, where were they held remotely or was there a creative space for that? Poellnitz: We did it at the gallery space every Saturday. Every Saturday. And our therapist had a baby. So, they&#039 ; re coming, they&#039 ; re gonna go back in the summer. They&#039 ; re gonna start back in the summer and we&#039 ; re gonna be at Jefferson Middle School. Last year we had a four-week social camp with them, with community artists and the therapists as a camp. And it was four weeks of campers and we had four cohorts of students and we&#039 ; re returning to that program in the summer. And we&#039 ; ll be returning with like regular art programming with Oceanside Unified School District on top of providing the Saturday space for the students again for group therapy. Savo: And I&#039 ; m also curious to know like what kind of activities were these students engaged in when it came to the group therapy sessions? Because obviously this is a period where, it&#039 ; s a lot of, where social distancing was a very key thing and masking was also very important. How are these exercises or how are these sessions organized? What were these specific activities? Poellnitz: Well, it&#039 ; s so interesting &#039 ; cause we kept over going through the whole pandemic. We, Hill Street changed its whole operation system to be more appointment-based. And we created capacities. We were very highly sensitive about Covid, like people had to wear masks all the time. We provided, Dr. Bronner&#039 ; s used to donate tons of like hand sanitizer. Like we used to give like little packets out to people who came visit the gallery space. If anyone wanted to see an exhibit, they make an appointment. They would have the space to themselves for 20 minutes to visit the exhibit. And we wouldn&#039 ; t be in the space with them. We&#039 ; ll be like upstairs above where, you know, the distance, like it basically were by themselves. And then with &quot ; The Social,&quot ; &quot ; The Social&quot ; was like every Saturday. We had a capacity, I believe of like eight students at a time. And so, we have the space for people to spread out. And then everyone had materials. I mean, it was really easy to manage. I think when people care for each other and they care that they have a safe space, people make sure they don&#039 ; t show up sick. People made sure to wash their hands. People made sure to keep their masks on. We did have a lot of workshops on Zoom. We had a lot of artist&#039 ; s talks on Zoom. We had like -- what is it called? We had AR [augmented reality] gallery exhibitions. So if you couldn&#039 ; t see the work in person, we recreate gallery space online, and people can navigate and look at art online as if it was in a gallery space. Savo: That&#039 ; s really interesting-- Poellnitz: Yeah, we did a mobile art workshop. We got a grant right before the pandemic hit and we were supposed to have all this programming in every community center in Oceanside, but it was Covid and so we had to adapt, and &#039 ; cause they already gave us the money for it. So, we created a mobile art kit and like a lunch bag and it was like all the materials to like the perfect measurement and quantity that you needed for that project. We had our exhibition artists create a project and give us a list of materials for that project. And we used to do like a whole visual, like YouTube recording of how to create the piece. And then we did like a live Zoom and Instagram workshop, but anyone with a library card was getting mailed a mobile art workshop kit from us. Yeah so, we did a lot of organizing through the pandemic to stay open. It wasn&#039 ; t just simply being open, like we had to reorganize like our operations. We created an appointment system, we created more QR codes for people instead of like, there was no reason for anyone to touch anything in this space. People were able to pull out their phones and QR code and read like the show statement. And then we had Zoom workshops and people will get their MOD kits and you know, we did a lot of cool things on Zoom. It was fun. I don&#039 ; t know, you just learn how to care for people! Savo: What do you think was the-- &lt ; Poellnitz and Savo talking over each other&gt ; I&#039 ; m sorry. Poellnitz: Go ahead, no you go ahead. Savo: What do you think was the reception towards all these different restructuring and different outreach? Were people positive? Poellnitz: People were positive. People were very positive. And not only just positive, but our audience grew. We were more accessible to people outside of Oceanside. Savo: Do you think that broadened the scope of Hill Street? Do you think it helped? Do you think it helps sort of bring a lot of those ideas and those concepts from the North County down to the South Bay? Poellnitz: Oh for sure. When I moved to Normal Heights a year and a half ago and people were like, &quot ; oh, you&#039 ; re here now. I&#039 ; m like, yes.&quot ; And then just we love everything that you&#039 ; re, like, people from the arts commission knows what we&#039 ; re doing. Like I see a lot of gallery spaces and museums who are working with artists I worked with now. Worked with like five years ago, two years ago. I see the influence of our work on visuals. I see a lot of art spaces in San Diego, like institutions with bigger budgets, now creating visuals about their space. And I know we influenced people over the pandemic. They tell me and sometimes their programs look like it. It&#039 ; s wild. And it&#039 ; s like, wow. We did a lot over the pandemic while they sat still and they just watched us. Jeff always tell me, he&#039 ; s like, &quot ; you can&#039 ; t be mad if people are copying. Isn&#039 ; t that what you want?&quot ; I was like, &quot ; Oh yeah, that&#039 ; s how that works, huh?&quot ; Like, you influence people and they do the things you want them to do. Like have more like Queer folks or Black people or do more of this type of art. Like, oh they are listening, that is an impact. I didn&#039 ; t think about it like that. And he&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Yeah you just keep doing what you&#039 ; re doing. If they wanna do what you&#039 ; re doing in, see how far you can teach them, see how far they&#039 ; re willing to go.&quot ; And you know, that&#039 ; s, that&#039 ; s been like the best advice I&#039 ; ve ever had doing this work. Because it&#039 ; s true. When you have autonomy and you could do whatever you want or say whatever you want, or stand by what you believe in, you have a bigger impact than the person who&#039 ; s quiet and not doing anything &#039 ; cause they&#039 ; re scared. Savo: And speaking to that, that wanting to take initiative and be expressive. How does that coincide with some of the challenges that you were mentioning earlier about equity and inclusion? How do those two sort of intertwine with one another? Poellnitz: Dude, it&#039 ; s because it hurts. Because a lot of like organizations, a lot of people who do fund the arts are scared. They just scared of change. People are scared of change. And so there&#039 ; s always gonna be resistance. There&#039 ; s always gonna be the folks with resources who can like, jump like pounce on your idea. And because they have money, they can do it sooner and faster and get more visibility. That&#039 ; s gonna happen. It is exhausting. It wears you down, it discourages. Makes it harder for you to get access to grants or, or donors. But then at the same time, I&#039 ; ve just been thinking about this a lot lately. Cause you know, Hill Street, we&#039 ; re at a point where I&#039 ; m kind of exhausted, but at the same time I know why I&#039 ; m exhausted and I gotta do things differently and I have to be a little bit more strategic now, like where I wanna go because I notice that a lot of people are watching us. And then people have a lot of expectations for us. And there&#039 ; s also a lot of opportunities for us in the position that we&#039 ; re in because of the work that we&#039 ; ve done over the last ten years, you know? And especially the work that got highlighted during the George Floyd protest era. So, like I&#039 ; m hyper aware and I&#039 ; m being a little bit more wise about who I partner with. I&#039 ; m being a little bit more wise on how often I say no because I was a person that never said no before. And because I never said no, I got burnt out and not paid a lot. And I&#039 ; m learning that me as a Black woman, my rest is very important, but it&#039 ; s also important that I have equity so I can get paid to do this work. So, I&#039 ; ve just been thinking about how to slow down and sometimes less is more like I don&#039 ; t have to be over the place. I just need to be effective where I have intentions. So, it&#039 ; s like pulling back to that personal space has been going on with us lately. Like this being more local, bringing it all in, focusing on what we&#039 ; re strong at, getting into contract with the Oceanside Unified School District. Like that&#039 ; s a healthy source of funding for us. Instead of chasing donors who don&#039 ; t share our principles, I think artists and art organizers need to ask themselves like &quot ; Why are you here? What vision do you have? What community you belong to? What are your principles?&quot ; I think those are questions that anyone in the arts needs to ask themselves. Just be honest with yourself and if you could be honest with yourself, you should always know the choices that you&#039 ; re making. For me, I realize I wanna be my own institution and there&#039 ; s gonna be some hardship &#039 ; cause I won&#039 ; t be conforming to a lot of institutional like practices. I will be creating new practices. I&#039 ; m highly aware of the up and down of this art world for me. For me. And I&#039 ; m honest with myself. So it&#039 ; s easier for me to commit, but because I&#039 ; m honest with myself, I create ways that can sustain me. Like, I do more like art consulting jobs. I collaborate more with non-art, institutional spaces, you know? I work a lot more with community members who are in the political scene. So I understand like the fluidity of art. And if you&#039 ; re heavily relying on the same funders that fund the problem, yeah I would have concerns for the equity. But if you are creative and you know your worth and you are honest with yourself about why you&#039 ; re here, you always can find a solution. And because that&#039 ; s what&#039 ; s worked for me. Savo: And speaking to equity and how Hill Street has evolved over the past ten years, what do you think are some of the things that you personally wanna see for the Hill Street Club? You mentioned that you prefer more local engagement. You prefer being with individuals that are more like-minded in terms of art expression, in terms of inclusion. What are some of the hopes that you have for Hill Street moving forward? Poellnitz: I would love to have a community school. I want a community school. I worked for a nonprofit in City Heights and we worked with community schools that worked with juvies. They call them JCCS like Juvenile and Correction Community Schools. And they&#039 ; re like directly tied to the unified school district and the court system. At one point when I was heavily involved in politics, I was working with a former city council member in hopes of becoming like a divergent program for youth in the arts. So like, if a kid got arrested for the first time, instead of like putting them on probation and sending them to jail, you send them to like a diversion program. And the city of Carlsbad Police Department is the only police department in San Diego County that has an actual diversion program for youth. And so, you know, you get to be an organization as a choice for, for young folks and teach &#039 ; em all the skills, like how to create programming, how to run programming, how to make art. It&#039 ; s like a six-month commitment. I wanna do something more like that. I wanna have a community school. I wanna teach art the way that I experience art, the way that artists experiencing art. I wanna create a new institutional space for art practice. I don&#039 ; t know, I just really wanna grow as a bigger institution, as a choice, as an alternative choice to other places. Savo: And obviously you&#039 ; ve given a lot of thought to the idea of this community school and obviously diversion programs as well, such as Carlsbad&#039 ; s. Do you see potentially a branching out of Hill Street? Moving forward within not just North County, but also San Diego County as a whole? Do you see elements of what you&#039 ; ve been able to create and to adapt with? Do you see any of that being replicated any elsewhere in the County? Poellnitz: Um, not yet, but we partner with a lot of folks in San Diego so we are very unique because we have to adapt. One thing you learn about our institutions, old ones, they can&#039 ; t adapt. So, when they can&#039 ; t adapt, they move slow. They struggle with adapting. And one thing about us, because we don&#039 ; t, we don&#039 ; t follow institutional like, uh wisdom. A lot of us are taking in diverse knowledge from each other, practicing being inclusive. And once you do that as an action, you can make decisions a lot sooner than later. And so we&#039 ; ve been doing a lot of like partnerships and pop-ups with a lot of orgs in San Diego. I just want a community school. I want a community school. I want studio spaces for artists. I would like to have a choice for young people to learn about art and not just learn about art but have creative access to like a space where they can learn about the world and express themselves. Like I would like to have a community school. I have no aspirations to be all over San Diego County. That sounds like a lot of work. &lt ; laughs&gt ; Savo: Oh, absolutely &lt ; laughs&gt ; Poellnitz: And I worked with a lot of people in San Diego County. I love you San Diego, but North County is so special. Like us North County people, we are so innovative &#039 ; cause we&#039 ; ve had so little. And when we learn something new, we master it because we don&#039 ; t have all the museums in galleries and big budgets that San Diego has or L.A has. So we are very mom and pop and DIY in North County and we support each other. And so, I don&#039 ; t know, that&#039 ; s the civic identity for me. You know, that&#039 ; s part of my civic identity. Savo: And speaking to this, sort of bring it all back in identity, the personal, the communal, the universal that Hill Street represents. Do you think that a community school would be a perfect foster for that? And I&#039 ; m just curious about the age groups. Something I&#039 ; m actually quite interested about, would this be open to not just middle schools, the middle school age range that Oceanside education part has worked with, but would you extend that? Would you put a limited K through 12 per example? Poellnitz: I don&#039 ; t know. I don&#039 ; t know. That&#039 ; s a lot of years. &lt ; laughs&gt ; Savo: It&#039 ; s a lot of funding. Poellnitz: It&#039 ; s a lot of funding. I know that the folk at Link-Soul, they run the Goat Hill Golf course in Oceanside and it&#039 ; s already been promised to us that we will build some type of like, institution space for a community school one day. So, we&#039 ; re all dreaming like what we wanted to have. Savo: That&#039 ; s awesome. And just before we wrap up our interview here today, was there anything that we had previously discussed or discussed throughout the interview that you wanted a little bit more emphasis on or anything that you wanted to touch base with before we end today? Poellnitz: I don&#039 ; t think so. You&#039 ; re fine. Savo: Awesome. Again, thank you so much for this interview. It was really informative, and I think it&#039 ; s great to learn about how art has really grown in North County. Because I&#039 ; m from the South Bay, so I wouldn&#039 ; t know too much. But I think this was a great experience and I thank you a lot for that. Poellnitz: Oh, thank you, I appreciate that. https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en audio Property rights reside with the university. Copyrights are retained by the creators of the records and their heirs. This resource is licensed for noncommercial educational use using CC NC-BY 4.0. Please contact Special Collections at archives csusm.edu if you need reproductions made. Please see the related “Preferred Citation note” for language on citing materials from this collection. Permission to examine Library materials is not authorization to publish or to reproduce the examined material in whole, or in part. Persons wishing to quote, publish, perform, reproduce, or otherwise make use of an item in the Library’s collections must assume all responsibility for identifying and satisfying any claimants of the copyright holder. The researcher assumes full responsibility for use of the material and agrees to hold harmless the University Library, and California State University, against all claims, demands, costs, and expenses incurred by copyright infringement or any other legal or regulatory cause of action arising from the use of the Library's materials. In assuming full responsibility for use of the material, the researcher also understands that the materials they examine may contain Social Security numbers, other personal identifiers, and/or sensitive material on potentially living and identifiable individuals (e.g., medical, evaluative, or personally invasive information). The researcher agrees not to record, reproduce, or disclose any Social Security number or other information of a highly personal nature that may be found. 0 https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PoellnitzDinah_SavoRiccardo_2023-04-05.xml PoellnitzDinah_SavoRiccardo_2023-04-05.xml Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Poellnitz, Dinah. Interview April 5, 2023. Description An account of the resource Oral History Interview of Dinah Poellnitz on April 5, 2023. Interview discusses Dinah Poellnitz’s community engagement within the city of Oceanside through art. In particular, the interview focuses on Poellnitz's involvement in the founding of the Hill Street Country Club art gallery in Oceanside, CA. Poellnitz discusses how to navigate through the art community as a Black woman, emphasizing the importance of equity and inclusion. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SC027-025 Subject The topic of the resource Art -- Study and teaching Art galleries -- nonprofit Artists, Black Community engagement COVID-19 (Disease) and the arts COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020- Hill Street Country Club -- California -- Oceanside Women artists Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023-04-05 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dinah Poellnitz Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Riccardo Savo Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Los Angeles (Calif.) Oceanside (Calif.) Vista (Calif.) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos Language A language of the resource English Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Dinah Poellnitz Activists and activism Art and artists Black experience Community history History Department internship Women's experience https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/files/original/24d0b5f1274c5333980a77f42e10980f.pdf fc3ce6202a3c7ec1f83a9311a0316116 PDF Text Text DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 Riccardo Savo: Awesome. Alright, so today is April 5th, 2023. I am Riccardo Savo, a graduate student at California State University of San Marcos. I'm interviewing Dinah Poellnitz for the University Library Special Collections Oral Project. Thank you so much for being here with me today. Unfortunately, you're not able to have the video, so we'll just rely on audio today, which is perfectly fine. And I would like to begin quite broadly if we can, if you could tell me how you became interested in art and how you initially related it to the community or to community engagement. Dinah Poellnitz: Um, then that's like a childhood memory question for me. I'm from North County. My dad came to Oceanside Camp Pendleton in the seventies. I was born in [19]76. I think my dad came out here in [19]78 and we lived on base and if you know anything about North County during that time, it was like, you go to church, you watch sports... and that was it, you know? And my mom's from the South. She's from Louisiana and you know, my mom's about church and we used to go to church all the time. And my mom had a friend named Carla. She was like a wacky woman too. She was just elusive, like all over the place. She used to be an architect and she saw that I loved to draw. And so one day she just gave me her drafting table and I was, I could, I think I was like in -- 11 years-old -- and she brought all her materials and stuff to my house and I was just like, whaaaat? It was like a whole new world. I was just like, wait... there's a table made just for drawing? That happens? You know, it was like one of those moments. And I used to dr-- I wanted to be a costume designer, so I used to draw dresses and fashion all the time on that table. And I had a whole setup. But I just remember just being this little kid who had my own little like, workspace and, and it was just for me to draw. And I was like, wow, there's a, there's... you could do this. Like, this is not a like day, you know, day drawing at home. This like, you could really do this as a, like, as an adult. So yeah, I was maybe like 11 and it was Carla from Fresh Bread Church. <laughter> Savo: That's awesome. So, you began this at age 11 and did you carry this through to your high school? Because I know you attended UC [University of California] Riverside and earned your Bachelor's in art history. Poellnitz: Yeah, I did. You know, like I was a kid that always made my own. Like I made my own. I designed dresses. I made my own prom dress. I sewed it, I wore it. I was heavily into -- It was the nineties in high school. And so, my parents, my dad retired, and then we moved outta Oceanside and moved to Vista for my high school years. And... it was hip-hop era, so I was like into dance and music. So that was all part of art and expression. But I remember wanting to be in the art clubs and I was just like, I can't if that, if art club's about realism and like drawing like things perfectly, I don't have time for that. That's real. I was just like, I don't even, I'm not even curious to learn that. I don't wanna do that. Cause that's what art club was defined as in high school for me. Savo: So would you say that your engagement was more self-disciplined? It was more geared towards how you wanted to engage with it, or more or less, how you could find avenues to apply it? Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 1 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 Poellnitz: Um, it was more intentional for me. You know, I like fashion, so I drew. I drew dresses and I designed a dress and I sewed a dress and I wore it. It was just, it was all intentional. It was like just being, it was an action, it was a language for me. It was... it was a skill, you know, I just thought very creatively all the time. Even when I was learning economics, I was thinking about it creatively so it can make sense for me. I think they say that artists are like divergent thinkers, you know? We always find or create and build and make an alternative solution to solve a problem in art. So that's kind of like that, that's a habit. Um, yeah, ‘cause in, in high school, I used to go dancing. I used to go to like, this is corny as hell: I used to skip school and go to the Soul Train and dance in Soul Train in High School. I was just expressive. It was a very creative, like moment as a kid for me being in high school in the nineties, like hip hop was like jazzy like baggy and like there was more Black designers like Dubbo jeans and FUBU and all that stuff came out. So it was kinda like a Renaissance era, even though I lived in, in a little North County and, you know, Blacks were a smaller percent of the community. There's like, that culture was just present when I was in high school. So me not wanting-- Me not wanting to join like the art club for high school and draw something perfectly was just like, eh, I can have fun. That feels like studying for economics. I don't wanna do that right now. I wanna enjoy creativity right now. I don't wanna study it. I was not in that mood. It was just a part of my life, you know? So... and then I used to go to LA every summer when I was in high school to get away from North County and stay with my cousins who worked at movie theaters. And that's when I was exposed to like museums and galleries and, you know, and I took a class at Santa Monica College and that's when I learned like, oh snap, you can learn art history? This is more interesting than like actually drawing the horse, you know? Um, I just learned that art had intentions all the time. Like I was, I was also like poor, you know? And I'm a, I come from a Black family, so to venture off into art, it's just like: you gotta make sure it makes money! My uncle in LA is like, what are you getting a degree in? Are you gonna be able to teach with that? I'm just like, hmm, I don't know, you know, and, but I enjoy it and I excelled at it. And like, I had a teacher, I took like Japanese art history at Santa Monica College, and I was just blown away by the history, like the political history, the social impact, just like everything that you see in art, like how it's a reflection of like moments of history or just moments of inequity. I thought that was very interesting how artists could use that as a language to communicate, to organize, to protest, to be expressive of what they don't like in society. So yeah, I loved art history and that was like perfect for me. Cause when I think about it, I was into dance and music, hiphop culture because it felt liberating. I designed and made my own prom dress because, you know, it gave me ownership. And those are like human right feelings. Savo: And speaking to that, about the ownership and the intentionality, your decision to do art history as a degree and as a major, was that a choice that you made? Was that a choice that you had made from Santa Monica to UC Riverside? Poellnitz: Mm-hmm Savo: OK- Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 2 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 Poellnitz: It was intentional. Yeah. So I, when I was at Santa Monica, it was cool. I had a lot of friends and they were like all into politics. I saw Amy Goodman when I went to Santa Monica College. And so I had a lot of friends who were into like, the political and social justice part of education. And I was like, I wanna do art history. <laughs> I like it. I like pictures, I like reading-- images, I love that. I love telling, retelling those stories or using it as a form of communication. But I was like, I think I wanna-- I remember telling myself in our junior college, I wanted to have a gallery space. It was intentional. And I applied to all the schools that had the double major art history and art administrative 'cause I wanted to learn the business side and the admin part. I didn't know what I was gonna do. I didn't know I was gonna get the gallery, but I was like, “Hey, if I wanna work in a gallery, I need to have these skills or just to better understand it.” ‘Cause I have to justify going to school for art history, not just to my family but to myself. Savo: And so you mentioned that you wanted this applicability, you know to translate the skills that you learned in your degree to, to real life and to getting a job. Poellnitz: Yeah to a job--. Savo: Could you tell me a little broadly about your experience with that community engagement and, and political activism and how that helped formulate what is now, you know, the Hill Street Country Club because it's a great gallery in Oceanside and you don't really think about Oceanside being, uh, very cultural. At least you know, the North County, South Bay, in terms of San Diego County in general. But how did that come about? Poellnitz: Um, well I finished school, lived in L.A. for quite a bit. Played assistant nanny manager, like these jobs separate from what I wanted to go to school for because I was living in L.A and I had to learn how to multitask. And I took on like a lot of assistant jobs and one day I was just like, I was working for lie celebrities and like producers and stuff and you know, I saw how things were operating behind the scene creatively for money. And then I also understood the realities of like creating for me and the possibilities. And so, you know, I always kept a job and one day I decided, like me, my husband, we split [up] and me and my little kid, we moved back to North County and I still had my L.A job. So, I was still commuting like three to four times a week from Vista to L.A for my job. Cause they paid me well. But I decided to start volunteering at the Oceanside Museum of Art and their education department, but they didn't have one yet. So, I ended up volunteering with the proprietors. I learned about installation at Oceanside Museum of Art and I was still, I still had my like feet in two different worlds. I was still in the L.A world, but also in my hometown world. I did work at Patricia Korea Gallery in Santa Monica, and that was a very eye-opening experience at the<inaudible>was in college. Just, she was like the only woman of color, like gallery owner. And she only represented brown artists at the time, which was very <inaudible> in Santa Monica. Well, but inequity in like the gallery world when I was in college with that job, I would apply to like the Getty and all types of museums when I lived in L.A. with my friends. But my friends would always get the job even though I had a better CV than them. You know you just accept it. And so I just went back to like doing assistant work and then I decided, I was like, you know what, like I'm gonna lean a little heavy. Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 3 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 Like now that I'm back in Vista, I'm gonna lean in a little bit more in North County and invest more of my time there. And so that's when I started volunteering at OMA [Oceanside Museum of Art]. Then I learned about the infrastructure of the museum world because, you know, I always wanted to work in a museum. I always thought museums were an amazing place to tell stories and educate. I never knew about the dark side of museums, you know, like how they get art and how they flip art and also like the politics of like hierarchy and institutions, you know, I learned-- I didn't know about that in school. No one ever talked about that in school. We only talked about art history. But once I started volunteering and then turned into a paid position at Oceanside Museum of Art, I learned about institutions really quickly, and I also learned not just about art institutions, but I also learned about like civic engagement and city planning because, I still had my, my foot in L.A so I was used to going to galleries and museums and seeing public art, having friends who got paid as full-time artists or had very creative jobs. I know what's possible. And so, you know, being back home, I just like, “okay, why don't we have public art again." And then I had to like learn beyond what school taught me through experiences. Like, oh, public art is political and it's not, political is a message, it's political because you have to politically know how to create a system so that there can be public arts, right? At the time OMA, no one knew Oceanside Museum of Art exists. You know, 12 years ago no one knew. I didn't even know. I like googled and like looked for art spaces and I somehow, and only because I was intentionally looking for art space in North County, close to home, I found it. But it wasn't like it was vibrant and it was attracting people like me and they should be attracting people like me for living in LA and loving art. I didn't know it exists out of Google art spaces in North County. And that's how Oceanside using a popped up. And I noticed that they didn't have an education department. They had Julia Fister who was volunteering for the education department that she created as a volunteer because she had a big grant with Target to make sure every fifth grader goes to the museum. But she didn't have a office space or studio room for education. It was like she just came and sat at a table and made it happen and fifth graders came. And me and my business partner, Margaret Hernandez, we just decided, you know, we were both in education and we did all the docent tours with the fifth graders and the, and the workshops with them. And we just like had a lot of community conversations with young people, people in middle school, so you learned about their like starting point to art, who in the, in the classroom who visit[ed] that day, who had more access to art than others. Who had materials, who been to museum. You know, you learn so much about the demographics and like, I'm sorry but the demographics were pretty like astounding when you see majority of the Brown/Black kids saying this is their first time. You know. Or you have students ask you if they could take home some of the like, crayons or pastels at home so they can keep drawing. You're just like, dang, kids don't have like crayons? Like how do you not have crayons? You know it-- Or kids asking like, or the one kid who's just like, who knows about art but like, how do artists even make money? Like kids would ask those questions all the time. How do artists even make money? Like what do art, what can artists do? You know? And those were conversations for me ’cause I was always intentional. I was just like artists designed your shirt, the artist probably designed like a machine that's in the hospital that you are using, artists design buildings. I'm like, art is involved in Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 4 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 literally your whole life. You just don't know it. And you probably could have more, but you just don't know it. Right? And so I just started asking questions about how do we get more murals? How do we get public art? How do we have art walk? And I learned that I had to like volunteer with like Main Street, like a commerce type of org, who had a relationship with the city to get extra funding for projects for the city. I had to learn about that dynamic. I learned about putting things on the docket. Like I learned how art was, wasn't just like creative, but it was also political and it was also like [it] required you to engage in the system to understand how to create public art opportunities. You know, it's just, we didn't, Oceanside didn't have an infrastructure for art. Like we've made a lot of improvement, but we didn't have an infrastructure, we had an arts commission, but it was it was in silo and they weren't funding anything and they were just meeting each other, talking about projects around town, you know? The museum wasn't engaged at the time. It was, it was treated more like a private gallery space than a public space. And it was, ‘cause you know, Oceanside Museum of Art is not owned by the city. It's owned by a group of retirees, you know, and there's a lot there. There's also the retirement culture that you have to deal with. Like when we started Hill Street, we were very engaged with our friends and our family and community members. And we worked with people who couldn't get a space or an exhibition. We worked with those artists and they brought their family and friends. Like, it was a gathering opportunity for people. It made sense. Savo: And how were you able to attract these different artists? Were these artists specifically located in Oceanside or were they spread out through across San Diego County? Poellnitz: No it started in Oceanside. It was our friends first. We grew like a concentric circle, if that makes any sense. It was, um, we fit Hill Street like artist, personal, communal, universal. And like this, if I think about how we grew as a concentric circle, it was very personal for me, Marj, to begin Hill Street Country Club because the museum was rejecting all our ideas and they were not being cool or like easily invested in education. They made it very hard for Oceanside Museum of Art to create an education department at the time. And so in support of an education department, because we, you know, we did those docents and we listened to young people. So I'm like, “you need an education department. It's necessary.” We supported Julia and her vision to make an education department for the museum. And we tried to throw our first fundraiser for that vision of hers. And the museum would say no to us. Like, we're like, “Hey, can we do a fundraiser for the education department?" And they're like, no. And then we're asked like, “Can we borrow some chairs and tables for a fundraiser?” “Uh, not right now. No.” And basically like we knew we need an education department like, Oceanside, if you're gonna have Oceanside Museum of Art and you're taking up the city's name and you're having fifth graders come in and you're getting grant money, you need to have an education department, right? And that's just common sense to us. And so we told all our friends the idea of having a fundraiser for the Oceanside Museum of Arts Education Department to support Julia. Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 5 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 And one day I was like driving home to dinner to meet Margaret and I saw that the Link-Soul building light was on and they were having a gallery show. And I walked in there and I was just like, this is the art space? And Jeff, who is the co-owner of Link-Soul was just like, yeah. And I was like, this is interesting. I was just so shocked to see a gallery that had a show. And the next day I went over there and met Jeff, someone got him, and I introduced myself and I pitched our fundraiser idea. He, like, he said yes to me, to like using this space for free. And so that was our first event that we organized, and it was called “Open to the Public” and it was about, you know, the need for art education. It was a fundraiser for OMA. And so, we just asked all our friends who were artists in North County and then like people who I went to school with, ‘cause I was taking classes at Miracosta for fun, for art and asking teachers to support it. We had a big turnout, and we were able to donate to the education department and purchase art materials and bags for every fifth grader of Oceanside for that year that visited the museum on that program. So that was like the first time where we were just like, wait, this was successful. People are thirsty. Like it's not just us who want [to] have more like community opportunities, you know, with art. So like I said, it's like we grew a concentric circle because we started off very, it was very personal for us to do that. And then once we had our first event, we understood the like community purpose. Like, oh this is not just us, this is a community issue too. We want, we want more opportunities to do stuff like this and we don't have it. It was like, “I want more of this. Like how do we, how do we keep doing this?” And so me, Margaret, just because we couldn't afford our own space and I still working back and forth in L.A, we just did pop-up art shows for like two solid years all over Oceanside. And then we went to community art events or like art events in San Diego because they had more of a presence of art for us back then, ‘cause we weren't really doing much as a city. So, we would go to events and openings in San Diego all the time. I don't know, it was this became very like, personal and communal. And then most of our artists are like working class, queer, young, old, um, more vulnerable, you know, and to like, to all kinds of things. And so, like most of them never had an opportunity to have an exhibition. They like paint it for themselves or put their art in a store, but no one's ever invited them to do an exhibition. And we would just invite artists for exhibition. But it was a curated experience, you know, and a lot of it was just, we choose artists that, that we shared messages with. I don't know, it just became a very organic growth. Savo: This is excellent to learn about. ‘Cause I didn't know that there's so much underneath, in terms of the layering, in terms of structuring, in terms of networking that's involved. Could you just clarify briefly who exactly Jeff and Julia are in relation to the Hill Street Country Club? Poellnitz: So Julia Fister at the time was the education director at the Oceanside Museum of Art. And she was one of my- me and Margaret's mentor. She now owns Studio Ace in Oceanside where it's focused on youth and like art education, which is really cool cause she's in the valley. Very much needed over there. And then Jeff, Jeff Cunningham is a artist but is the creative director for Link -Soul, which is a golf apparel company. Their design team is based in downtown San Diego. And we share, we co-op a space with them. That's where we have our gallery. And Jeff Cunningham is a phenomenal artist. Like I Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 6 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 curated him for a show for Oceanside Museum of Art. And our friendship, just like it grew from like me being a curator and an artist and him being an artist and us really like exchanging ideas about social impact and how do we create an art space that's different, that's more authentic and doesn't have all these pressures to over-perform, be productive. And so like, it's natural. It's interesting ‘cause he said yes to us having our first art show at his space and then he ended up giving us this space for Hill Street. Savo: That's awesome. And since Hill Street has been open and been around in the community, how has the gallery become that space where it's not just the ideas or expressions that are being presented, but how has that space become a platform really, sorry... How has that space become a platform for activism? Because, you know, you noted in a 2020 interview with KPBS that art is a functioning tool that should transition off the canvas. Poellnitz: Hmm-hmm. Savo: How has Hill Street Country Club played in that part? Poellnitz: You know, it's so funny cause every time I get asked like, “oh are you an artist too?” Like,” yeah, I'm an artist, I make work, but I don't make it anymore.” I was like, I make, I build art, you know, I can build stuff. But right now, my art is Hill Street Country Club, and you know, it's, it goes back to college and me like learning about all like the social impact and inequities in the world through art history. It goes back to that. And it goes back to like, you know, artists are some of the most vulnerable people because first of all, you're not respected with pay whatsoever, ’cause you have to remember like, I knew I had to get paid to do this or I shouldn’t be doing it. I should be like a teacher or an engineer or a therapist. Like, you went to school for art and people need to get paid for that. So we live, we live in North County where there's, we were spending like 10 cents per residence on art funding while like San Diego at the time was spending ten dollars. So, and then also trying to convince older peers in the art community that they had to pay for admin stuff that we organized. And then thinking that everyone had time to volunteer because at the end of the day, we had a large retirement class that was in charge of the art community in Oceanside and Vista. You know, they didn't see the value of paying younger people to help them with the arts, you know, there's uh cultural differences. And that being said, you know, to get paid is not just like, to get paid is the equity issue, right? And then not only to get, you know, to get paid is the equity issue. And if you're like Black and people don't even take you that, if you look at the museum stats and gallery stats for like, artists and like people who make it, you already know. You're like, you're dealing with so many microaggressions, you're dealing with some unresolved supremacy issues. Like I always tell folks like, hey, check this out. Like, um, it's okay if you're racist, I get it. You're not me. You don't have these experiences and you have to unlearn and I'm gonna give you grace to unlearn, but I'm always gonna speak up for what I-- what you Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 7 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 did. And I'm gonna not call you out, but I'm just gonna call you in and say like, “hey you know what you did was kind of racist could you not do that?” And I learned that was always like a threat to people when I was honest and like gave them grace at the same time. And I learned in the art community that they're not ready for those conversations at all. Or like, just to like unlearn and do better. So, but because I have ownership of my space and I don't work for anyone and I don't have a board that disagrees with my politics, I have a lot more autonomy than a lot of my artist friends or my art admins who work in museums and high-end gallery spaces. And so I get to embrace artists that are political, who are in the streets, who are organizing, who are building different collectives or opportunities for relief or whatever they believe in. I have a beautiful space. I also share my autonomy with them and I support their work. And because I believe in equity too. Cause I'm trying to get paid, I'm dealing with microaggressions. This is personal. Like what, what affects you is affecting me. And also, I'm like, I just don't like people being in pain. I'm an empathetic person. I, I don't know, I'm pretty radical politically, so I have to-- if I have my own autonomy, I'm gonna use it. I'm not gonna shy away from that. And the artists that I admire were doing that. It went that I was learning art history. They were telling a story, they was telling us how wrong this was and that was. Like, they're pointing out problems and they're doing it in the nuances of art. And I think it's very important for artists to tell those stories so people can gather and discuss and find solutions or to just build creative- what is it critical mass? No, I think it's critical mass is like valuable, once you learn it's not just yourself. It's like a Power in Numbers game. Savo: Would you say that speaking to it's a power in numbers game, do you think that that has changed your perspective on the, the personal communal and universal experience that Hill Street Country Club offers? Because obviously since it's opened, now since the pandemic 2020, do you think that it's become a situation where art more than ever needs to be more expressionist or more, um, as you say, it has to be more, you know--? Poellnitz: Yeah,- Savo: It has to be more- Poellnitz: It should be. It should be. You know I was just talking to my colleague Astrid Gonzalez, she is one of the Hill Street colleagues. She does all our audio-visual stuff. And she was reflecting the other day and she was like, “we really never stopped working during the pandemic.” I was like, we didn't, we couldn't afford to. We're vulnerable. We don't have board members with money. We don’t have-- like the reason why we can do all that we do is because we have people aligned with our principals who agree with us and who are not scared support what we're doing. But at the same time, to get paid in this art world, you gotta have some like, dirty person on your board. That's just reality. Like, you gotta think Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 8 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 money. And it's, that's just how it works. It's an institution. Like every institution in America has flaws, right? And during the pandemic, we stayed open. We were very creative of finding creative ways to stay open and accessible to our audience and to our artists. Cause a lot of my artists during the pandemic were dealing with poverty, food, needed food, like, mental health. The pandemic was messing people up in the first like two years. And a lot of my artists were affected by that. I worked with a lot of Brown and Queer and old artists, you know, and in this economy, they were suffering. And so, I had to figure out how to be a safe space and use my space for opportunities for people to get access to food or help folks get access to mental health services or even a distraction like coming, making art. I had to stay open for two and a half years during the pandemic, while a lot of big museums were closing and doing bare minimum because they didn't wanna get Covid. So, I don't know, my space has always evolved and adapt, because it has to. Savo: Speaking to- Poellnitz: Right now—Go ahead- Savo: Oh no, go ahead. Poellnitz: I forgot what I was going to say, go ahead. Savo: Speaking to the space having evolved, you mentioned that Hill Street became a space that allowed for those economic hardships of the pandemic, to kind of be alleviated for your artists. Could you speak about the political upheaval? Because we all lived through 2020 and we all know how painful it was during April, May, April through June of 2020. How did that come about? How was Hill Street a space for comfort, a space for expression? Poellnitz: Yeah, that was interesting. Cause like I'm the only like Black gallery owner in San Diego. And I've been doing this for so long that I, I belong to extended part of the San Diego art community that a lot of folks don't see in North County. Like I know a lot of people in museums and galleries and stuff like that. And I know a lot of people in City government and Federal government. And so, you know, during that time it was just like, this is when you make art. This is when you talk about these issues and you use art as a language and as a tool to have these community conversations. But also, this was also opportunity for us to do mutual aid. We went into care mode, like how do we care more about people? Like how do we care back? Like how do we take care of each other? Because during that time we know who's not taking care of us, we know who doesn't protect us. And it was more like being available to protect and provide care. Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 9 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 I kind of miss those days. Those were the days where we were talking about liberation and how to use resources to create safe, safer communities. We were talking about solutions for the first time out loud as a public. We were sharing empathy with each other. I thought it was a beautiful opportunity for us to build something new. But it was also beautiful to see that we could be in solidarity. I had people who knew me in the business community of Oceanside, but never went to our events. Always knew what I was doing if I went into their store or their restaurant or coffee shop or whatever. And that was the first time a lot of those folks came out and donated to us. <laughs> You know, like checked on us. And I was like, “Wow, this is the first-time people cared about what we are doing over here. Like, this is interesting.” And I think there was a fear for a lot of folks like “I hope this isn't discourage her.” Or maybe I'm just thinking that in my head, I don't know. But I did see a lot of people come out the woodworks who started supporting us. And it gave us funding to create more programming and we kept going. So, I don't know. I was just adapting. I think that's what you do when you're in survival mode all the time. Savo: And since the pandemic, obviously the adapting to the circumstance and situation, have there been any local projects or exhibits that you've, partaken in or helped organize that reflect those changing structures or those change in activism? Cause you mentioned a lot about talking about solutions and you mentioned how there's this real need for concern for one another, this care for one another. Has there been any of these projects that reflect that? Poellnitz: Yeah so we got really involved during the pandemic. We created like a mental health like group therapy program for young middle school kids, “The Social,” and it was just like, we had a license. We have a licensed therapist, one of our artists, and it's like a group therapy through art, but also peer on peer because a lot of young folks were isolated from each other during the pandemic. And they're still coping with, you know the environment they had to live in, to stay away from everyone and not getting us sick to die. That's kind of traumatic. And then we're asking them to like, go back to normal real quick so we can jumpstart our economy. So we created a program, “The Social,” with the therapist for young people. And now we're gonna be part of the Oceanside Unified School District programming for summer, fall, and winter, I mean summer, fall and spring now. So we're now like, we created a program that's gonna be in the school system that provides mental healthcare for young people who need it the most. And then we just recently had an exhibition with <inaudible> Roca Gonzalez, who lives in Oceanside, who's from Puerto Rico. And they're working about all these social issues and we're coming together and recognizing we are a product of gentrification and colonialism. We live through it every single day. Like we have all this architectural vernacular that reminds us that we're all living through this. It's not just Puerto Rico, you know, it's everywhere. We're all surviving. I've been able to sit on a lot of committees and boards and be part of more equitable decision making for artists that I'm excited about that's gonna be coming out soon with the city of San Diego, helping a lot of like artists get access to money. That was like one thing that I did during the pandemic, was I did sign up on committees and boards because I'm just like, “You guys are making this process way Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 10 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 too difficult for people who have to work full-time jobs and take care of family.” Not everyone's out here just being an artist on retirement mode and can fill out all these questions and type all these like, letters of intent. You gotta make this more equitable-like process for like poor people with very limited time, you know? So it was part of a San Diego artist project that raised like $150K for artists in San Diego. And we made the process so easy that a lot more like trans and BIPOC artists actually applied and received funding to be a artist over the pandemic. That was amazing. I mean once I decided I was committed to equity and inclusion for myself, everything I do affects everyone. As a Black woman, it just does naturally, like we're-- The stats prove it. If you improve my life or if you improve my life in your surrounding, you benefit from it. Like literally, like if Dinah says she wants more vacation days, I work too much and because I, and I don't normally give vacation day. Oh my God, imagine if you give it to me, you're gonna have to give it to my coworker. Not everything I want, everything I need because equity benefits everyone. So I understand a lot of my personal experience or communal experiences and has universal like means that needs <inaudible>. Savo: And I was just curious, because we were speaking about these different programs and different committees that were happening during the pandemic. Before we jump back to the equity portion that I'm really fascinated to know more about, how were these committees and how were these programs organized? Were they all organized remotely? Were these children or these group therapy sessions that you mentioned, where were they held remotely or was there a creative space for that? Poellnitz: We did it at the gallery space every Saturday. Every Saturday. And our therapist had a baby. So, they're coming, they're gonna go back in the summer. They're gonna start back in the summer and we're gonna be at Jefferson Middle School. Last year we had a four-week social camp with them, with community artists and the therapists as a camp. And it was four weeks of campers and we had four cohorts of students and we're returning to that program in the summer. And we'll be returning with like regular art programming with Oceanside Unified School District on top of providing the Saturday space for the students again for group therapy. Savo: And I'm also curious to know like what kind of activities were these students engaged in when it came to the group therapy sessions? Because obviously this is a period where, it's a lot of, where social distancing was a very key thing and masking was also very important. How are these exercises or how are these sessions organized? What were these specific activities? Poellnitz: Well, it's so interesting ‘cause we kept over going through the whole pandemic. We, Hill Street changed its whole operation system to be more appointment-based. And we created capacities. We were very highly sensitive about Covid, like people had to wear masks all the time. We provided, Dr. Bronner’s used to donate tons of like hand sanitizer. Like we used to give like little packets out to people who came visit the gallery space. If anyone wanted to see an exhibit, they make an appointment. They would have the space to themselves for 20 minutes to visit the exhibit. And we wouldn't be in the space with them. We'll be like upstairs above where, you know, the distance, like it basically were by themselves. And then with “The Social,” “The Social” was like every Saturday. We had a capacity, I believe of like eight students at a time. And so, we have the space for people to spread out. And then Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 11 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 everyone had materials. I mean, it was really easy to manage. I think when people care for each other and they care that they have a safe space, people make sure they don't show up sick. People made sure to wash their hands. People made sure to keep their masks on. We did have a lot of workshops on Zoom. We had a lot of artist’s talks on Zoom. We had like – what is it called? We had AR [augmented reality] gallery exhibitions. So if you couldn't see the work in person, we recreate gallery space online, and people can navigate and look at art online as if it was in a gallery space. Savo: That’s really interesting-- Poellnitz: Yeah, we did a mobile art workshop. We got a grant right before the pandemic hit and we were supposed to have all this programming in every community center in Oceanside, but it was Covid and so we had to adapt, and 'cause they already gave us the money for it. So, we created a mobile art kit and like a lunch bag and it was like all the materials to like the perfect measurement and quantity that you needed for that project. We had our exhibition artists create a project and give us a list of materials for that project. And we used to do like a whole visual, like YouTube recording of how to create the piece. And then we did like a live Zoom and Instagram workshop, but anyone with a library card was getting mailed a mobile art workshop kit from us. Yeah so, we did a lot of organizing through the pandemic to stay open. It wasn't just simply being open, like we had to reorganize like our operations. We created an appointment system, we created more QR codes for people instead of like, there was no reason for anyone to touch anything in this space. People were able to pull out their phones and QR code and read like the show statement. And then we had Zoom workshops and people will get their MOD kits and you know, we did a lot of cool things on Zoom. It was fun. I don't know, you just learn how to care for people! Savo: What do you think was the— <Poellnitz and Savo talking over each other> I’m sorry. Poellnitz: Go ahead, no you go ahead. Savo: What do you think was the reception towards all these different restructuring and different outreach? Were people positive? Poellnitz: People were positive. People were very positive. And not only just positive, but our audience grew. We were more accessible to people outside of Oceanside. Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 12 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 Savo: Do you think that broadened the scope of Hill Street? Do you think it helped? Do you think it helps sort of bring a lot of those ideas and those concepts from the North County down to the South Bay? Poellnitz: Oh for sure. When I moved to Normal Heights a year and a half ago and people were like, “oh, you're here now. I'm like, yes.” And then just we love everything that you're, like, people from the arts commission knows what we're doing. Like I see a lot of gallery spaces and museums who are working with artists I worked with now. Worked with like five years ago, two years ago. I see the influence of our work on visuals. I see a lot of art spaces in San Diego, like institutions with bigger budgets, now creating visuals about their space. And I know we influenced people over the pandemic. They tell me and sometimes their programs look like it. It's wild. And it's like, wow. We did a lot over the pandemic while they sat still and they just watched us. Jeff always tell me, he's like, “you can't be mad if people are copying. Isn't that what you want?” I was like, “Oh yeah, that's how that works, huh?” Like, you influence people and they do the things you want them to do. Like have more like Queer folks or Black people or do more of this type of art. Like, oh they are listening, that is an impact. I didn't think about it like that. And he's like, “Yeah you just keep doing what you're doing. If they wanna do what you're doing in, see how far you can teach them, see how far they're willing to go.” And you know, that's, that's been like the best advice I've ever had doing this work. Because it's true. When you have autonomy and you could do whatever you want or say whatever you want, or stand by what you believe in, you have a bigger impact than the person who's quiet and not doing anything ‘cause they're scared. Savo: And speaking to that, that wanting to take initiative and be expressive. How does that coincide with some of the challenges that you were mentioning earlier about equity and inclusion? How do those two sort of intertwine with one another? Poellnitz: Dude, it's because it hurts. Because a lot of like organizations, a lot of people who do fund the arts are scared. They just scared of change. People are scared of change. And so there's always gonna be resistance. There's always gonna be the folks with resources who can like, jump like pounce on your idea. And because they have money, they can do it sooner and faster and get more visibility. That's gonna happen. It is exhausting. It wears you down, it discourages. Makes it harder for you to get access to grants or, or donors. But then at the same time, I've just been thinking about this a lot lately. Cause you know, Hill Street, we're at a point where I'm kind of exhausted, but at the same time I know why I'm exhausted and I gotta do things differently and I have to be a little bit more strategic now, like where I wanna go because I notice that a lot of people are watching us. And then people have a lot of expectations for us. And there's also a lot of opportunities for us in the position that we're in because of the work that we've done over the last ten years, you know? And especially the work that got highlighted during the George Floyd protest era. So, like I'm hyper aware and I'm being a little bit more wise about who I partner with. I'm being a little bit more wise on how often I say no because I was a person that never said no before. And Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 13 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 because I never said no, I got burnt out and not paid a lot. And I'm learning that me as a Black woman, my rest is very important, but it's also important that I have equity so I can get paid to do this work. So, I've just been thinking about how to slow down and sometimes less is more like I don't have to be over the place. I just need to be effective where I have intentions. So, it's like pulling back to that personal space has been going on with us lately. Like this being more local, bringing it all in, focusing on what we're strong at, getting into contract with the Oceanside Unified School District. Like that's a healthy source of funding for us. Instead of chasing donors who don't share our principles, I think artists and art organizers need to ask themselves like “Why are you here? What vision do you have? What community you belong to? What are your principles?” I think those are questions that anyone in the arts needs to ask themselves. Just be honest with yourself and if you could be honest with yourself, you should always know the choices that you're making. For me, I realize I wanna be my own institution and there's gonna be some hardship ‘cause I won't be conforming to a lot of institutional like practices. I will be creating new practices. I'm highly aware of the up and down of this art world for me. For me. And I'm honest with myself. So it's easier for me to commit, but because I'm honest with myself, I create ways that can sustain me. Like, I do more like art consulting jobs. I collaborate more with non-art, institutional spaces, you know? I work a lot more with community members who are in the political scene. So I understand like the fluidity of art. And if you're heavily relying on the same funders that fund the problem, yeah I would have concerns for the equity. But if you are creative and you know your worth and you are honest with yourself about why you're here, you always can find a solution. And because that's what's worked for me. Savo: And speaking to equity and how Hill Street has evolved over the past ten years, what do you think are some of the things that you personally wanna see for the Hill Street Club? You mentioned that you prefer more local engagement. You prefer being with individuals that are more like-minded in terms of art expression, in terms of inclusion. What are some of the hopes that you have for Hill Street moving forward? Poellnitz: I would love to have a community school. I want a community school. I worked for a nonprofit in City Heights and we worked with community schools that worked with juvies. They call them JCCS like Juvenile and Correction Community Schools. And they're like directly tied to the unified school district and the court system. At one point when I was heavily involved in politics, I was working with a former city council member in hopes of becoming like a divergent program for youth in the arts. So like, if a kid got arrested for the first time, instead of like putting them on probation and sending them to jail, you send them to like a diversion program. And the city of Carlsbad Police Department is the only police department in San Diego County that has an actual diversion program for youth. And so, you know, you get to be an organization as a choice for, for young folks and teach 'em all the skills, like how to create programming, how to run programming, how to make art. It's like a six-month commitment. I wanna do something more like that. I wanna have a community school. I wanna teach art the way that I experience art, the way that artists experiencing art. I wanna create a new institutional space for art Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 14 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 practice. I don't know, I just really wanna grow as a bigger institution, as a choice, as an alternative choice to other places. Savo: And obviously you've given a lot of thought to the idea of this community school and obviously diversion programs as well, such as Carlsbad's. Do you see potentially a branching out of Hill Street? Moving forward within not just North County, but also San Diego County as a whole? Do you see elements of what you've been able to create and to adapt with? Do you see any of that being replicated any elsewhere in the County? Poellnitz: Um, not yet, but we partner with a lot of folks in San Diego so we are very unique because we have to adapt. One thing you learn about our institutions, old ones, they can't adapt. So, when they can't adapt, they move slow. They struggle with adapting. And one thing about us, because we don't, we don't follow institutional like, uh wisdom. A lot of us are taking in diverse knowledge from each other, practicing being inclusive. And once you do that as an action, you can make decisions a lot sooner than later. And so we've been doing a lot of like partnerships and pop-ups with a lot of orgs in San Diego. I just want a community school. I want a community school. I want studio spaces for artists. I would like to have a choice for young people to learn about art and not just learn about art but have creative access to like a space where they can learn about the world and express themselves. Like I would like to have a community school. I have no aspirations to be all over San Diego County. That sounds like a lot of work. <laughs> Savo: Oh, absolutely <laughs> Poellnitz: And I worked with a lot of people in San Diego County. I love you San Diego, but North County is so special. Like us North County people, we are so innovative 'cause we've had so little. And when we learn something new, we master it because we don't have all the museums in galleries and big budgets that San Diego has or L.A has. So we are very mom and pop and DIY in North County and we support each other. And so, I don't know, that's the civic identity for me. You know, that's part of my civic identity. Savo: And speaking to this, sort of bring it all back in identity, the personal, the communal, the universal that Hill Street represents. Do you think that a community school would be a perfect foster for that? And I'm just curious about the age groups. Something I'm actually quite interested about, would this be open to not just middle schools, the middle school age range that Oceanside education part has worked with, but would you extend that? Would you put a limited K through 12 per example? Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 15 2023-04-24 �DINAH POELLNITZ Transcript, Interview 2023/04/05 Poellnitz: I don't know. I don’t know. That’s a lot of years. <laughs> Savo: It's a lot of funding. Poellnitz: It's a lot of funding. I know that the folk at Link-Soul, they run the Goat Hill Golf course in Oceanside and it's already been promised to us that we will build some type of like, institution space for a community school one day. So, we're all dreaming like what we wanted to have. Savo: That's awesome. And just before we wrap up our interview here today, was there anything that we had previously discussed or discussed throughout the interview that you wanted a little bit more emphasis on or anything that you wanted to touch base with before we end today? Poellnitz: I don't think so. You're fine. Savo: Awesome. Again, thank you so much for this interview. It was really informative, and I think it's great to learn about how art has really grown in North County. Because I'm from the South Bay, so I wouldn't know too much. But I think this was a great experience and I thank you a lot for that. Poellnitz: Oh, thank you, I appreciate that. Transcribed by Riccardo V. Savo 16 2023-04-24 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Transcripts Description An account of the resource Written oral histories and transcripts are available for researchers that prefer the written word, or to see the whole interview in a document. Transcripts of <a href="https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/collections/show/5">audio and video files</a> are also available as part of those video files. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Poellnitz, Dinah. Interview transcript. April 5, 2023. Description An account of the resource Transcript of oral History Interview of Dinah Poellnitz on April 5, 2023. Interview discusses Dinah Poellnitz’s community engagement within the city of Oceanside through art. In particular, the interview focuses on Poellnitz's involvement in the founding of the Hill Street Country Club art gallery in Oceanside, CA. Poellnitz discusses how to navigate through the art community as a Black woman, emphasizing the importance of equity and inclusion. Poellnitz also discusses operating her gallery during the pandemic, and future aspirations. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dinah Poellnitz Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Riccardo Savo Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023-04-05 Subject The topic of the resource Art -- Study and teaching Art galleries -- nonprofit Artists, Black Community Engagement COVID-19 (Disease) and the arts COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020- Hill Street Country Club -- California -- Oceanside Women artists Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Los Angeles (Calif.) Oceanside (Calif.) San Diego (Calif.) Vista (Calif.) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en</a> Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Dinah Poellnitz License A legal document giving official permission to do something with the resource. Property rights reside with the university. Copyrights are retained by the creators of the records and their heirs. This resource is licensed for noncommercial educational use using CC NC-BY 4.0. Please contact Special Collections at archives@csusm.edu if you need reproductions made. Please see the related “Preferred Citation note” for language on citing materials from this collection. Permission to examine Library materials is not authorization to publish or to reproduce the examined material in whole, or in part. Persons wishing to quote, publish, perform, reproduce, or otherwise make use of an item in the Library’s collections must assume all responsibility for identifying and satisfying any claimants of the copyright holder. The researcher assumes full responsibility for use of the material and agrees to hold harmless the University Library, and California State University, against all claims, demands, costs, and expenses incurred by copyright infringement or any other legal or regulatory cause of action arising from the use of the Library's materials. In assuming full responsibility for use of the material, the researcher also understands that the materials they examine may contain Social Security numbers, other personal identifiers, and/or sensitive material on potentially living and identifiable individuals (e.g., medical, evaluative, or personally invasive information). The researcher agrees not to record, reproduce, or disclose any Social Security number or other information of a highly personal nature that may be found. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SC027-025 Activists and activism Art and artists Black experience Community history History Department internship Women's experience Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral Histories Description An account of the resource Video and audio oral histories can be viewed here. Histories are listed alphabetically by last name. Individual histories are indexed and transcribed and can be searched. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <p>Rights to oral histories vary depending on the history. The library owns the copyright to some histories, and has license to reproduce for nonprofit purposes for others. Please contact CSUSM University Library Special Collections at <a href="mailto:%20archives@csusm.edu">archives@csusm.edu</a> with any questions about use.</p> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Julia Friedman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Leea Pronovost OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PronovostLeea_FriedmanJulia_2022-04-08.xml Interview Keyword This filed adds keywords to the Omeka Oral History item type. Keywords are included in the OHMS XML, this field in Omeka will allow for full data migration between OHMS XML and the Omeka Record. This field does not impact the OHMS / Omeka integration and is optional if you do not need to map the "keywords" field in the OHMS XML to the corresponding Omeka record. Activism (LGBTQ) OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 5.4 Oral history of Leea Pronovost, April 8, 2022 SC027-18 1:16:52 SC027 California State University San Marcos University Library Special Collections oral history collection CSUSM This oral history was made possible with the generous funding of the Ellie Johns Scholarship Fund at Rancho Santa Fe Foundation and the Library Guild of Rancho Santa Fe. LGBTQ+ activism LGBTQ+ rights San Diego (Calif.) Springfield (Mass.) Transgender people -- Civil rights Activism (LGBTQ) Leea Pronovost Julia Friedman mp4 PronovostLeea_FriedmanJulia_2022-04-08.mp4 1:|14(8)|21(14)|30(2)|36(8)|44(3)|54(13)|62(11)|70(6)|77(4)|91(7)|98(1)|104(2)|112(2)|119(11)|127(11)|135(11)|144(1)|155(8)|167(12)|175(1)|181(10)|189(1)|194(8)|201(8)|210(5)|217(6)|227(8)|236(1)|244(11)|252(11)|261(10)|269(2)|276(6)|283(8)|291(14)|299(10)|308(2)|316(11)|324(12)|332(15)|340(3)|345(11)|353(10)|361(7)|367(6)|375(8)|383(1)|390(1)|398(11)|405(14)|417(7)|430(6)|437(7)|444(1)|451(3)|463(2)|473(9)|481(14)|490(11)|500(2)|512(6)|523(11)|534(15)|542(5)|549(13)|558(1)|568(10)|576(1)|582(13)|597(9)|604(6)|611(2)|616(17)|623(6)|631(7)|649(5) 0 https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/files/original/b85338e1bff43294d1016cc0062ca02f.mp4 Other video English 0 Introduction and childhood Julia Friedman: Okay. Today is Friday, April eighth, 2022 at 10:02 AM. I am Julia Friedman, a graduate student at California State University San Marcos. And today, I am interviewing Leea Pronovost for the University Library, Special Collections Oral History Project. Leea, thank you for being with me here today. Leea Pronovost: Oh, thank you for having me. Friedman: I would first like to start by asking when and where were you born? Pronovost: I was born in 1959, October second in Springfield, Massachusetts. Friedman: And can you please describe your childhood? Pronovost: (laughs) Well it wasn't exactly a very pleasant childhood, let's put it that way. One of my earliest memories was actually in 1963, I was four years old and at a Christmas party at my grandmother's house. And I saw my grandmother used to give us little money cards every Christmas--all of her grandchildren. And I noticed my name on an envelope my mother was holding. And I asked her what that word was in front of my name. My grandmother had written “Master.” And I didn't know that word--I didn't. So, she told me what it was, that it was a “Master” and what it stood for. And then I saw she had my little sister’s envelope in her hand and I asked her what was in front of my little sister’s name because of what's different than mine. And, uh, it was “Miss” and I asked her what that meant. And I said, I basically said, “There's something wrong here.” And I think, “I'm supposed to be more like the ‘Miss.’” (laughs) So after her explanation of which each one of those terms meant. As you can imagine that was 1963. So, (laughs) a whole different world. And my mother basically told me to shut up and never talk about it again. Which, you know, because we actually started getting into an argument about it in front of all my aunts and uncles and cousins. And so that's why she told me that. And honestly, I never did talk with her about it again. She actually died before I ever had a chance to, so. That's one of my earliest memories. After that it didn't get much better dealing with that issue. I mean, I was raised very strict Catholic. I was an alter boy. I, um, in my teen year, even, I spent a lot of time in a Jesuit monastery trying to pray that away if you will. And even thought about going into the seminary at one point and becoming a Catholic priest. But I didn't, I ended up joining the Navy. But that's (laughs) another story. So, the--and my father wasn't exactly the nicest of people. He was very much, as you can imagine, a bigoted person, against gays and people like me. I can remember being a kid and hearing about Christine Jorgensen [the first transgender woman in the United States to attain fame for receiving a sex reassignment surgery] and some of the remarks that my father talked to about when he referred to her and were--made me feel very terrible about myself because I knew that's how I felt. So, it wasn't an easy time, believe me. But that's pretty much my basic childhood. Leea Pronovost discusses her experience growing up in a conservative and homophobic household in Springfield, Massachusetts during the 1960s. childhood ; homophobia ; Massachusetts ; Springfield (Mass.) ; transgender ; transphobia 309 Time in the Navy Friedman: Well thank you for sharing that, Leea. I'm sorry that you had such a difficult time growing up. Pronovost: Well, it was a totally different world compared to what we have now. Being transgender wasn’t--I didn't even, I don't think that word even existed until, you know, the 1990s. At some point, I mean, people like me, they used to call them “transsexuals,” which nowadays a lot of the trans community considers that a derogatory term, so. And--but that's the way our society was back then. I mean, I can even tell you that in 1977, I joined the Navy, um, give you--for instance. And when I joined the Navy on my ASVAB, I scored in the top five percent in the nation and they gave me two strikes for going into bootcamp, one strike for coming out of bootcamp. And I was placed into, um, nuclear engineering program to be a nuclear engineer on a sub, and all my life, probably about 1965, I actually started cross dressing, borrowing my sister's clothes, because it made me feel better. But yet there was a certain amount of shame with that. So--but that continued on even into the Navy. And I can remember being on a leave of absence, going to a bar dressed up, and coming out of the bar and being discovered by my commanding officer who then proceeded to file charges against me for crossdressing. And I ended up going through a court-marshal. So, push came to shove, they didn't do what they call a Section 8 on me. What they did do was give me a personal hardship discharge, because they basically said they didn't want “my kind” there. So, but it was very nerve-wracking. I can remember thinking--and I was living in Massachusetts at the time. I'm like thinking throughout the entire court-marshal worst case scenario, they Section 8 me, classify me as, you know, “mentally disturbed,” because of my crossdressing. And if I had went back to Massachusetts with that on my discharge papers, they could have (laughs) at actually put me into a mental institution back then. They still had governmental-run mental institutions in Massachusetts then, and they were not a very pretty sight. And even with people like me, they would actually--and gay people--they would actually lobotomize them trying to “fix them,” so to speak. So, (laugh) it wasn't, it was a totally different world. And I can, you know, they appreciate all the things that, people like me and the whole, uh, gay movement, gay rights and people that fought for and the seventies and even into the eighties and are still fighting today. And I'm one of them. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: Because no matter how far we've come, there's still much further to go. So. Leea Pronovost discusses exploring her gender identity through cross-dressing, as well as her time in the Navy, beginning in 1977. Cross-dressing ; homophobia ; Massachusetts ; transgender ; transphobia ; United States. Navy 572 Coming out/ Turning towards activism Friedman: I would actually like to switch gears if that's okay and talk about your years in activism. You've been an activist within the transgender community for twelve years. When did you first decide to turn to activism? Pronovost: Well, after I felt--after I came out to everybody, um--let me explain. In 2006, I had a near death experience that actually--because as I told you, you know, from 1963 on--I knew something was different. 2006, I had a near death experience that caused me to look at what my life was about, who I am, why I survived. And I came to the realization that I had to do something about this. And I started my transition soon as I recovered from that, which was probably about a year after that. I was well enough to actually--I didn't start hormones at that time, but I started looking at herbal supplements that would change my body. And I didn't come out to everybody. My current ex-wife at the time, I did come out to her about changing. And she was okay with it as long as I didn’t tell anybody. She carried--being a Latin person, carried a certain stigmatization around who I was. So, um, but anyway, it took me a couple of years to get on hormones and there's even stories there (laughs). I was actually denied my hormones at one point in time by my therapist, which really--I didn't understand why. I understood that that was the laws. And then, you know, I've heard other stories of other going to support groups and talking to a therapist and learning how to come out to basically the world. And it troubled me how difficult it was. And that whole path of trying to-- knowing deep down inside (laughs) all my life, that something was different, just never realized what it was and because I grew up before internet. And so, it the only place I could find information was in a library. And I was too ashamed to go into a library and pull a book about transsexuals (laughs), you know? Especially with my Catholic upbringing. So, it was very difficult and there were many times that throughout my life that I actually tried to commit suicide because of that. Because I thought I was alone. I thought I different. I never knew there was people like me. And then finding all those hurdles that I had to jump through. And then at the same time, you know, I started discovering that the state that I live in, Massachusetts, didn't even have any protections for transgender people. And if I tried to rent an apartment or buy a house, or, you know, get a job as a trans person, people could actually say “No,” because I was transgender. So, these things really disturbed me down to my core because, you know, it is who I am. It is my identity. So, that's what really got me to become more active and become an advocate and activist for the community because I wanted to make it better for the next people. I want to make it better for the next generation, so they don't have to struggle like I did. Not knowing who they were. I wanted to give the trans community that visibility so that they have role models that can even, you know, that they can idolize basically, and say, “I want be like that person.” Because as a youth, you know, I never had that. We, I mean, if you look in the sixties, seventies and eighties, the people that were portrayed as trans-- what we now call transgender or transsexuals-- in those times, they were either the joke of the movie or they were, you know, the crazed maniac killer (laughs), you know? And I would look at them and I would say, “Oh, that's me when I grow up.” But yet, then I find out that they're either the joke or they're, you know, the crazed maniac killer. And I'm like, “Okay, well, that's not me.” So, I'm not like that, but you know, here I am, that's who I was. So, I wanted to be able to give, you know, the next generation, the next batch of people, because I--after going to a bunch of support groups for being transgender-- I realized that I wasn’t alone and there's a lot more people out there that are like me. And once I started doing my history research, you know, of transgender people--for instance, we've been around forever. I mean, I can tell you, in the Neolithic Age there was art drawings on cave walls of a third sex. And, you know, that date back to about 7,000 BC. So, (laughs) people like me, I've been around forever (laughs). It's just so something that hasn't been known, that's all, at least to the Western world. Because you take, you know--actually to be truthful with you, I identify as Two Spirit. The Indigenous people--not just here in North America--but Indigenous people all around the world have some of them have multiple genders. Two Spirit is an in North American Indigenous term that encompasses some tribes have as many as five genders, some three genders. Friedman: Wow. Pronovost: There's some tribes that don't even acknowledge gender. Men and women didn't have specific rules, if you will. I know of a tribe in Africa that, you know--I met a girl years ago, a trans girl from Africa. She had no concept of what he/she [pronouns] meant. They only had one pronoun for all people in her language. So, it was very difficult for her and even than her mother to understand that concept when they moved here to the United States. So. Leea Pronovost discusses coming out as a transgender woman in 2006 after a near-death experience. After coming out, Pronovost turns towards activism after noticing the hurdles that transgender people face in terms of access to medical treatment, or lack of protections in the housing or job markets. Activism (LGBTQ) ; LGBTQ+ activism ; transgender 1098 Activist activities Friedman: Wow. That's really interesting. And I'm glad that you finally found a community when you first came out. When you first started, um, your working in activism, did you partner with any organizations during these early years and what type-- what type of activities did you participate in? Pronovost: Oh, I partnered with many organizations to be truthful with you. One of the first groups--the two first groups that I partnered with were a group called Tri Ess [an international support group for heterosexual cross-dressers and their partners and families.]. It was actually started in the 1950s by a woman named Virginia Prince. Basically, that was for, in her terms, heterosexual cross-dressers. Although once I became involved in the club, found out that there were a lot of transgender people within the organization that wanted to actually transition. Not that I wouldn't say myself, I would say that cross-dressers do fall under the trans umbrellas, so to speak. So, but, some, some of them don't agree with that, some of them do agree with it. Some of them think they're the only true trans people, when you really get down to the nitty gritty. One of the other main things was the transgender group of Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts. I--that was a peer support group and we were active in helping others find out that--because one of the toughest things that I found was in talking to new people as they come into the groups that they always thought they were alone as well. Because they never knew anybody that was like them. So, you know, that made such a difference for me in my life to realize all of a sudden, “Hey, they're like me and you know what, they're okay. That's an engineer, that's a medical doctor and that's a lawyer,” you know? “This person, you know, is, you know, just a normal average person living their life (laughs) so it's not so bad.” So, it made such a difference in the world for me that it, you know, it just, it seemed like common sense to move into it. And then I mean, I blossomed into a bunch of other organizations. I, uh, (laughs), I didn't start my transition into late in life, as you can imagine. Born in [19]59 and starting in 2007. It was forty-seven or forty-eight years old or something like that. But the thing is it, they, it--I wanted to do as much as I could for, or wherever. And so not being of (laughs)--I decided to help another group called Rainbow Elders. That was a nonprofit group run by, uh, not another nonprofit, that they did stuff for seniors. I can't remember their name off of top of my head, but it-- we used to do things like go out on panels and teach medical facilities. We would teach nursing homes. We would teach assisted living centers. We were teaching people in, um, it just reaching out to all sorts of businesses and stuff and doing panels and educating them about the LBGT experience by telling our stories. Then, you know, I joined another group over at UMass Amherst and, I--that was the Stonewall Speakers Bureau. And they were very active within the GSAs [Gay Straight Alliance]. So, I used to go out to all the GSAs, whether it was a grammar school, middle school, junior high school, high school, and sometimes even other colleges, asking us to come out and speak to gender-related studies and/or education of the faculty. So, and then I started--because the group--that Pioneer Valley group and the Tri Ess group that I first started with--one of them was up in New Hampshire, even though I lived in Massachusetts and the other one was in the Southern part of Massachusetts. So, I was having a drive, you know, anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour, sometimes even two hours to go to a meeting. So, I decided to create my own peer support group, which I partnered with a hospital in Western Mass[achussets] in the county that I was in, Franklin County in Greenfield Mass. And they gave me a place to work with and a small budget. And I was able to start a group that actually still runs today, even though I'm here in California now. So, then because I also became part of what was known as the Massachusetts Transgendered Political Coalition, which in 2011, we ended up fighting for transgender rights. They made us actually take off on the bill by the time it--in order to get it out of committee, we had to take off transgender public accommodations rights. But it--bill did still encompass our rights to financial institutions, our rights for housing, our rights for, uh, financial housing and employment. Those were the three main rights that we were fighting for. Which it did end up getting passed in 2011 by the end of that year. Uh, they became-- (both talking at once) Friedman: (both talking at once)--Oh, congratulations. Pronovost: Yeah, thanks. But then again, in another organization that I became part of back in 2016, I helped to--we went back and lobbied or advocated for the state government to include transgender public accommodations, which would give us the--most people think, “Oh, that's the bathroom stuff and locker room stuff,” but there's so much more to it when you really sit down and think about it. The right to ride on a public transportation, the right to, (laughs), let's say I worked in a restaurant. If I punched out my time card to go out the back employee door and walk around to the front of that restaurant that hired me, they still have the right to refuse to serve me. Those are actually public accommodations. The right to be served in a hospital, you know? Many times throughout the years that I've worked, I've had myself and my friends have had discrimination by going to a hospital. I had one friend that they fell down on black ice and she got taken away on an ambulance and when they tore off or cut off her clothes, they found that she had a penis. And the doctor just looked at her and said--and then looked at the nurses and said, “Get that thing out of my hospital.” So, she--they called for another ambulance to take her to another hospital. Nowadays, because of that (unintelligible) she's permanently disabled, because she didn't receive the proper attention. And now, you know, we as taxpayers are paying to support her because of that discrimination. And so, things like that just didn't make any sense to me. So, you know, it made sense to go back and fight. So, we formed another organization called Freedom Massachusetts. And we fought for trans rights and we won them. But also, because of all that other activism, I had other organizations like PFLAG [organization dedicated to supporting the LGBTQ+ community ; formally known as Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays] and, uh, PFLAG in two separate counties, both of them had asked me on to be on their board of directors. So, I ended up being on their board of directors at the same time about the--that same time I had many friends that I lost over the years in the support groups. And when I say I lost them, I mean that they took their own lives. And they're no longer here. And prior to my transition, I never knew anybody that committed suicide. Now, all of a sudden in the few short years that I was out as a trans person, I knew more than half a dozen. And I just felt that was wrong. So, I had heard about a organization called Trans Lifeline, and I actually became an operator for them. And because I, myself, (laughs), had, as I told you before, early in my life, I didn't know how to deal with this. I didn't know there were other people like me, there were a few times that I'd tried to commit suicide. So, and if I-- so if I could prevent one trans person from (laughs) stop—help-- stop them from committing suicide, then, you know, that would make me feel great. So, I spent a number of years as an operator, and then I actually became a team lead for a bunch of operators. Actually, even given peer support to the operators, because if you can imagine Trans Lifeline was an organization that was created by transgender people, for trans gender people. And the only criteria was that you had to be trans to be an operator. What helped was, though most of the operators were ones that had tried to commit suicide at one point or another. And sometimes when you're talking somebody down from a suicidal attempt, it brings you yourself into some pretty dark places. So, the operators would definitely need some, you know, self-care and guidance to get back to a point where they can do self-care even. And I know that I have many cases that led me into dark places that I didn't want to go, but yet, I went there to try and make sure, and it makes a difference. It really does, the peer thing, because I've never lost anyone when I was talking with them. When an individual that's on that brink or on that fence, or standing on that (laughs) that [precipice] to jump, if you will. Having somebody else talk to you, that's been there and been through what your experiencing, makes a huge difference. And they open up and listen. And then they also feel much easier to open up to you so that they can pour those feelings out and step off that [precipice]. So, that was really nice work for me. And then the next thing that I (laughs) became active in was the Transgender Law Center up in Oakland, California. I started volunteering for what they call the Detention Project. The Detention Project is basically--there's a lot of transgender people within our prison system that either wanted to transition or had already started their transition and they’re wondering, you know, “Here you have this trans woman sitting in a male jail, what are her rights?” Um, you know, and, “Can she have her name change? Can she get women's clothing? Can be isolated so she's protected away from the general population?” All of these things and Transgender Law Center addresses all of those issues. I was basically a research person for the lawyers and I would actually go and research each individual state's laws pertaining to the detention of transgender people, and then compose letters. And the lawyers would then approve or ask me, you know, change this, change that. And then we would issue the letters back to the inmates, so that they knew what their rights were and how to fund those rights. So, which meant a lot to me (laughs) the next step phase in my, uh, was actually working with the local because I was doing on the national level. And I started working with the local county jails and state prisons, and department of corrections. And I helped them to write--I helped both Massachusetts and Connecticut to write their policies on transgender people. And then--the same way with most of the county jail systems, I helped them to write--and I ran peer support groups within the county jails as well, so. Then I met a woman online (laughs) and moved out here to California (laughs). Well, it, it took a while. It took a few years, it--we had a Coast-to-Coast relationship, and we developed this great relationship. And we decided to take it to the next level and move in together. And I tried to get her to come out to Massachusetts, but one point she came out and it was minus--the high temperature was minus fifteen degrees. And this was the week between Christmas and New Year's. So, she was like, “No, no, no, no.” (both laugh) So, of course I've moved out here, and been living here ever since then. But before I even moved out, once we made that decision to move out here, I was like, “You know, I'm an--I'm an advocate and activist. What do you have out there that I can get involved with?” So, she introduced me to the North County--she was living in Oceanside at the time, and she introduced me to the North County LGBTQ Resource Center. So, I met Max Disposti, the Director and Founder of the place. And I was like, “What can I do to come?” (laughs) You know? “What can I do when I get out here?” (laughs) “Where can I go?” He's like, “Don't worry, we'll put you to work.” So, (both laugh) soon as I moved out here, they had an opening for the Unicorn Homes program, which being a case manager for that program, it was only fifteen hours a week. But, to start, and I was like, “Hey, it's along the lines,” because a lot of times running the peer support group in prisons, I was helping people do a lot of navigate social services that they would need getting out of jail. So, it wasn't too far of a fetch for me to be able to help people, you know, navigate applying for Medi-Cal or, you know, Cal Fresh or being there just to listen and try to help homeless youth. And one of the things, even in Massachusetts, that one of my goals was eventually to create a transgender housing service. So, when I moved here and I had that opportunity to join something like this, I jumped on it. And Max liked what he saw in all the volunteer work that I did. So, he hired me for the position, even though there were a number of other candidates, I received the job. And I just started doing a whole bunch of free work for them (laughs). Because this is where my passion is. In the meantime, you know, I had been, you know, I still own property back East in Massachusetts, rental property. And, you know, I had a nice package of--so I wasn't worried about money or anything. So, why not work where my heart is? Nowadays though, I do a whole bunch of other things for The Center. I manage most of the grants for The Center. I also, now am, uh, Gender Advocacy Project Chair person for the Gender Advocacy Project, which puts on a number of events a year they do--we just recently had the Transgender Day of Visibility a couple weekends ago. Well, this weekend will be two weekends ago. Which was a wonderful event. We had, I don't know if I had to guess probably around 200, maybe 300 people come through and a bunch of booth with resources. And we had a great show. We had speakers and musicians and playing, and we had fun and games for the youth, and it was just a wonderful weekend. Wonderful day. But, so. Gender Advocacy Project also does Transgender Day of Remembrance. And, which is in November twentieth and a rather somber day for us because we're remembering those that we lost through transphobic violence. And the past few years have been actually kind of tough because the numbers have gone up astronomically in 2020, if I remember correctly, there was forty-one or forty-two, and in 2021, I believe there was fifty-six trans women. Now when I say these numbers, they seem like small numbers compared to a nationwide thing, but those are the ones that we actually know. Which, you know, a lot of times the gender is not known and, and they--or, and/or they misgender the person because the family doesn't want them to know about it. So, that number, even though the known cases keeps going up, I'm sure it's at least doubled if not tripled. So for-- for supposedly, according to the statistics, there's less than one percent of people are transgender throughout the nation. So, for that small amount of people to be targeted, the numbers of murders like that--violent murders--basically hate crimes, in my opinion, that's an astronomical amount. When you start looking at the statistics and the breakouts. Especially that most of those numbers, you know--I carry a certain amount of privilege because I'm a white transgender woman--or I appear to be white. I do have some American heritage, um, Indigenous blood in me. But that's something that people don't see because I appear to be white. So, therefore I've got a certain amount of privilege. I know that. When I look at a trans woman of color, those are the ones that are targeted when you look at those people that we honor year after year after year. It's usually Black or Brown people, and occasionally an Indigenous person in there. But, um, and sprinkled with a few Caucasian people. So, you know, it's so that when you look at that target population, that number, even it's more astronomical, when you break it down to what I call the “intersectionality of marginalizations.” So, you know, that's why that particular day is so important to me, even though it's a somber day. And I'm glad that we celebrate that and celebrate those lives that we lost. I'm hoping one day (laughs) and trying to do our best by fighting the hate. One of the grants that the North County LGBTQ Resource Center just got it is--we got a bunch of money into actually--and that's what the grant is called, “Fight the Hate.” (laughs) So, you know, it's an honor for me to be doing this work and nowadays I'm actually paid full time for what I do, because I do the grants. I do the Unicorn Homes. I'm also the Gender Advocacy Project Chair. I'm also--it, I never mentioned what I did prior to, well, while all that activation was going on, activism and advocacy work was going on, I actually worked a full-time job in telecommunications. I was a Level III Telecommunications Engineer. So, now I do all the IT work (laughs) at The Center as well. So, (both laugh), anything I can do for the community, you know, to make their life better. And, you know, I'm, uh, want to, you know, the North County LGBTQ Resource Center, I feel like I'm privileged to be able to work there, to be honest with you. And to be able to work in such a queer environment where I don't have to face what all my siblings face on a daily basis, you know? Because, despite all the work that we've done, there's still a lot of stigmatization, and even hatred of the trans community. It’s funny how, you know, one of the things, when you've learned the history, it was, you know, of the entire gay rights movement. One of--they say that turning point was Stonewall, right? Well, the first person to actually throw something at the police was actually a transgender woman. And the other trans girls started in. And then if you know, I know people that were actually there and they told me that basically the lesbians then started joining in. And it was at the encouragement of the lesbians that the gay men finally stood up and started doing something against the police. So, if you look at that in its context who, it--that key moment who was the first trans woman? But in gay rights movements, we were left behind. We were taken out because we were so controversial and they wouldn't be able to get their rights. That's what we were told as trans women or transgender people. If we were in clumped in with them, you know? So, even though we were there at the beginning and even well before that, you know, a lot of--there, there were riots all over the country, you know? If you look at San Francisco, if you look at Miami, there were riots in gay bars where trans women--and trans women were the target, because a lot of the women, because they couldn't get jobs were street workers. So, therefore they're trying to pick up these supposedly “men” that dress as “women,” which at the time was against the law, working as a sex worker. So, it's because of that attraction that the trans women stood up and then the lesbian stood up with them, and then the gay guys stood up with them. And yet, here they are fighting for their rights and telling us to step back. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: You know, it just didn't make sense. And believe it or not, there's still quite a few lesbian--for instance, I'm with another woman, I consider--I'm sexually attracted to other women. I'm romantically attracted to other women. Not so much with the guys. So, I consider myself basically a lesbian. There's a lot of lesbians out there that would tell me I'm not a lesbian because I'm a trans woman. These are what we would call TERFS: trans-exclusionary radical feminists. And they're out there all over the world, you know? One of the most famous and most recent news is J.K. Rowling. (laughs) Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: So, (laughs) despite all the love for, you know, the Harry Potter stories, I have to disagree with her principles. So, you know, so there's still--my point is despite all the fighting and activism and how far we've actually come, we still have a huge way to go. So. Leea Pronovost describes her experiences partnering with a plethora of LGBTQ+ activist organizations. Pronovost collaborated with organizations on the East and West Coasts, in fields and topics such as education, peer support, suicide prevention, prison reform, politics, housing, and gender advocacy. Activism (LGBTQ) ; California. ; Gay-straight alliances in schools ; Greenfield (Mass.) ; homophobia ; LGBTQ+ activism ; Massachusetts ; New Hampshire ; Oakland (Calif.) ; Oceanside (Calif.) ; PFLAG ; transgender ; Transgender discrimination ; Transgender Law Center ; transgender rights ; transphobia ; Tri Ess (Organization) 3098 Advocating towards inclusivity Friedman: That actually leads me to my next question. Um, do you think creating an inclusive society is achievable? Pronovost: (both laugh) Honestly, I hope so. You know, one of the latest endeavors that I've looked into is--and I hope I'm not premature in saying this. I've been appointed, still yet to be confirmed--a Senior Commissioner for the City of--Senior Affairs Commissioner for the City of Vista. So, I'm doing my part to hopefully make that true. I don't think it'll happen in my lifetime. I am much older than (laughs) most people nowadays. I am a senior, hence why I'm on that (laughs) Senior Affairs Commission. Or want to be on it. So, and as of lately, there's more and more transgender people within the political scheme, trying to fight the battle from within, which will hopefully eventually bring that about. I mean, that's my ultimate goal. One of the reasons why I do stuff like this, this oral history presentation, or any of my activism--a lot of it is educational. I have a pet peeve that, you know, education brings in tolerance. Tolerance can achieve, hopefully, acceptance. And once acceptance is there, in a general population, then the next thing that that should beget is inclusion. And that's where me, that's my goal. (laughs) Since coming out and becoming an activist, that's--that's my life--that's my life goal, if you will. I know I probably will not see it in my lifetime within the next twenty or so years. I hope we still achieve, you know, steps moving in that direction as we go. One of the things that the Biden administration just recently did, was give, uh, make the announcement on Transgender Day of Visibility, which is March thirty-first. They made an announcement that they were going to allow an X marker on the passports for a third gender. They were going to make it much easier for a person like me who, you know, I was identified male at birth, but yet, I'm a woman, make it much easier for somebody like me to change that name and gender marker on the passport. Another thing that they were planning on doing was one of the really bad areas that--and a lot of us had been fighting against this, the TSA--when you go through TSA screening in an airport and you have the x-ray, um, it's happened to me, you know? I identify as a woman, all my IDs are women and they see something down below. And they call you out, “Hey, we've got an anomaly. You need to step aside over here and we need to get somebody to physically search you.” Friedman: That’s awful. Pronovost: So, they're going to do away with that genderized screening. Which is an awesome thing. Finally, thank God. Because it's so embarrassing, you know, when that happens. And it happens to so many people, it's ridiculous what we have to endure and by being identified that way. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: So, that, that was a step in the right direction. They’re looking at making the Affordable Care Act more inclusive for gender treatment, especially one of the things that we recently did as the Gender Advocacy Project, which is the program of the North County LGBTQ Resource Center. I--one of my volunteers put together a list of all the state bills. For instance--what I mean by that is, last year in 2021, we had one hundred and ninety-one hate bills. Most of them were targeting transgender people. And in particular transgendered youth and their ability to receive transgender healthcare. Me, working on Trans Lifeline, know that most of those phone calls that I used to get in on Trans Lifeline are trans youth, anticipating and wanting to commit suicide. If they were accepted and were allowed to get their hormones, though, those numbers would drop drastically. And we have the statistics to back that up. But here, these states are wanting to outlaw and actually go even--go after doctors. And look at Texas. Texas wants to, you know, go after the parents saying that gender-affirmation healthcare for their child is actually child abuse, you know? So, one of the things the Biden administration said was they were going to fight, that they were going to make the Affordable Care Act to protect so that doctors don't have to report that to state agencies. Because they, you know, the state agencies, the state Texas--state of Texas, was forcing the doctors to violate people's HIPAA rights. I mean, they have no right to that information, but yet the state's forcing the doctors to turn that over. HIPAA's a national law, It's not a state law (laughs). They shouldn't be able to bypass federal laws. So, the Biden administration, uh, pledge to make it more difficult for states to be able to do stuff like that. You look at the “Don't Say Gay Bill” in Florida [SB 1834: Parental Rights in Education], you know? Ohio just came out with a bill last week--or just earlier this week, I forget which--that basically mimics the exact wording of Florida's bill. And no one, the state of Ohio and who they are and their history, that will pass, you know? So, we're going to have a couple of states that, you know, people are not allowed to say “You're gay.” There's another state in Utah. Utah wrote a bill that's very similar to Texas's bill about transgender healthcare, but it actually even encompasses adults. So, they want to make it illegal to be me (laughs), you know? And force--trying to force us to go back into the closet, so to speak. Because like I said, you know, one of the thing, one of their arguments is, “Oh, it's become a ‘popular thing.’” It's not popular. You just never knew what the real numbers were because we were all hiding away in the closet. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: So, you know. These are thing-- that's why I say we still have so far to go. This particular year though, in the first three months of this year, we have two hundred and thirty-eight hate bills. So, we even-- last year was a record year with all the hate bills, but in three months’ time, we have surpassed all of the bills from last year. So, they're--the thing that I'm looking at is I'm hoping this is like the last grasp (laughs) of them. (both laugh), you know? Their desperation before they fall down into the cracking crevice and go wherever. Friedman: I hope. Pronovost: (laughs) Go away. Yeah. Well, that's my hope (laughs). Because, you know, if you look at the statistics throughout the entire United States as a nation, over sixty percent of the nation is for transgendered people and having our rights or rights in particular of LGBT people. So, that's more than half the population. So eventually I know we will get there because that acceptance number and because, you know, I see the trends: tolerance, acceptance, then inclusion. I know we'll get there, but we still have so far to go. So, um, yeah. I hope that--I hope that answers your question (laughs). Leea Pronovost discusses her thoughts about inclusivity in society. She hopes that society will become more inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community, but believes that it may take many more decades before society’s acceptance of LGBTQ+ people can happen. She also discusses the Biden administration’s legislative’s initiatives to protect LGBTQ+ rights. Activism (LGBTQ) ; Biden, Joseph R., Jr. ; California ; homophobia ; LGBTQ+ activism ; transgender ; Transgender discrimination ; transgender rights ; transphobia ; Vista (Calif.) 3748 West Coast and East Coast LGBTQ+ politics Friedman: Oh, absolutely. Kind of going back to politics, Like throughout your time, working on the East Coast and the West Coast, have you kind of noticed a difference in the politics working on both Coasts? Or, has it just kind of depended, um, kind of like the political shifts because you kind of were mostly on the on the East Coast? Um, is it kind of-- does it not really matter because you kind of just, you mostly on the East Coast for most of your life and--? Pronovost: Um, be honest with you, knowing, I don't think it's that much of a difference here, you know. Here at times, I think there's certain pockets you, that if you will, that are actually inclusive. When I look at the city of Oceanside, for instance, you know? I had mayor Esther Sanchez come out to Transgender Day of Visibility and she gave a speech about being visible and standing up for what's right, you know? And, so I see Oceanside as a pocket, but yet, when I look at a city like Vista where I actually live, you know? Vista is, you know, for lack of better terminology, very conservative. But then there's even worse conservative areas. Like, you start pushing up into Menifee or something like that, you know? You're looking at very, um, I don't like to use this because I don't like to use somebody's name, but it very much what most of us within the community would consider to be Trumpers or people that propagate hate. And I hate using that because I don't like to talk about individuals or refer to that. But that term, let's take it away from the person because that term existed, uh, “Trumping somebody” is overcoming is somebody. So that's what I mean by that terminology, more or less. Where they are totally conservative. And actually, even don't like people like me. You know, I've had people up there in that city actually reach out to me saying they're having troubles with their school systems. Now here in California, for a transgender person and they should--a student should be able to change their name on all information except for their transcripts. That's the only thing that they can't change because that's a legal document, but they should be able to walk in without the school notifying the parents that, “Hey, I no longer want to be called Jane. I want to be called Max.” And the school legally is obligated to change their paperwork. Friedman: I see. Pronovost: But yet that's not happening in a city like that. I get phone calls quite often saying that the school is fighting the individual or the school has actually outed the individual to the parents, even. Because some of these schools aren't, you know, minors are even protected from this, the school is not supposed to out the youth. But yet here we have it happening, you know? And you know, it--so the hate and the stigmatization and the indignities and the discrimination still happens. No matter where you are and back East, I happen to live in a pocket--that Pioneer Valley group that I belong to. That's the whole Connecticut River Valley area throughout all of Western Mass. And that was very progressive. I mean, we--there's a town called Northampton there, which it is kind of, uh, was the gay city for the East Coast kind of equivalent to what San Francisco is to here. So, it's mainly a college town, but that made the entire whole (laughs), excuse me, for lack of better terminology, Pioneer Valley seemed very, uh, “granola-ish,” if you will. Originally Pioneer Valley, that whole Connecticut River Valley, those were the first communes back in the sixties. They started there and then moved out here to the West Coast. So, (laughs), very similar, you know, because even in Massachusetts, you still had your pockets of hate and bigotry and, so. It's very similar. The fight's the same, no matter where (laughs) I seem to go. But, you know, the goal is to get more cities, you know, to be like Oceanside, you know? Because Oceanside they've raise, you know, they do raise a pride flag. Here in Vista, the pride flag that (laughs) that rainbow flag's never been raised here in the City of Vista. And so, you know, I'm hoping that maybe sitting on one of the commissions, (laughs) I can change that (laughs) from within. And so, you know. Leea Pronovost discusses the similarities and differences between LGBTQ+-related politics on the West and East Coasts. California ; Connecticut River Valley ; Massachusetts ; Menifee (Calif.) ; Northampton (Mass.) ; Oceanside (Calif.) ; Vista (Calif.) 4167 The importance of empowering others / Conclusion of interview Friedman: Well, I just have one more question. Pronovost: Okay. Friedman: Um, so you, you've already talked about it. You have a wonderful year--a wonderful career in activism. What have you learned throughout your twelve years working in the trans and LGBT field of activism? Pronovost: Oh, (laughs), I've learned so much it's hard to pinpoint any one thing. I think the one that weighs the heaviest on my heart, if you will, is probably--you know, one of the things that early on people did mention about the intersectionality of marginalizations and now that I've had, you know, more than ten years at this, I actually get to see it. And that breaks my heart. How, you know, for instance, you know, I worked as a Telecom Engineer and I was the Senior Telecom Engineer for one of the world's largest telecommunications companies, Nippon Telephone, and Telegraph [Nippon Telegraph and Telephone]. The first time I walked into an engineering meeting as me, as Leea, they looked at me like, you know, I-- “Where where's the donuts and coffee?” (laughs). That was the type of look I got. And, “Who the hell are you to be sitting here in this engineering meeting?” When, you know, before I used to lead the engineering meeting, you know? So, I know the difference between being a man in a man's field and being a woman trying to make it in a man's field. And, and so I don't—[connection froze]—People that I serve doing what I do and I look at, you know, a trans woman of color, and I see how much more discrimination that they actually face. Because of that intersectionality. Now you start adding more intersectionalities on top of that, such as being disabled or mentally disabled, you know? Disadvantaged. That--those numbers not only do--I mean, they grow exponentially and that's what weighs really heavy on my heart. And now I see that so much more easily, and makes me want to fight all that much or for them, you know? But also at the same time, you know, being--working at the North County LGBTQ Resource Center, and seeing other people fight for, you know, my rights as a trans woman, I want to say, you know, not for me, without me, you know? So that's one of--that ties well into the intersectionality thing. So, you know, I know I can't go out there. I can mention about it, but I can't go out there and say, “You know, we need more protections for trans women of color.” I can say that, but, you know, I don't experience that because I do have that privilege. I can talk from that privilege that we need to do something about it, you know? So, but I want those, I want to be able to empower those trans women of color to come forward and speak up for themselves. I want to, you know, empower other people to do what I do so that the fight you, I know I'm not going to achieve my goal in my lifetime so that I know the legacy I leave behind is me helping them empower themselves so that they can even empower other people and move it forward. So, that's the main thing I've learned is that we have to give people the power to have that voice. So, it isn't just about any one person, it's about empowering an entire demographic, if you will. Friedman: Well, thank you. Is there anything else I should have asked or anything else that you would like to share today? Pronovost: Well, geez, we've covered so much. (both laugh). I don't know. I don't think so. I think we pretty much covered it. It's a lot to chew and digest, if you will. So, I think, I think we've done a good job. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: So. Friedman: Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today, Leea. We are so happy to have you a part of this project. Pronovost: Yeah, my pleasure is so, um. I'm just happy to be here. Like I said, that that's my pet peeve. If I can do something to--I'm hoping this gets seen by as many people as it possibly can be. And it gives them the self-confidence in seeing somebody like me to empower themselves to find their voice. So. Friedman: Absolutely. Just continuing on with your, uh, with what you've been doing from the start, basically ever since you started in 2007, 2008. Yeah. Pronovost: Yeah. Friedman: Yeah. Well, thank you again. Pronovost: You're very welcome. And it's my pleasure and thank you for having me. Friedman: Well, it's our pleasure (both laugh). Leea Pronovost concludes the interview by summarizing what she has learned throughout her career working as an activist and the importance of intersectionality in LGBTQ+ advocacy. transgender ; transphobia Oral history Leea Pronovost is a transgender activist and has been advocating for transgender and LGBTQ+ rights since coming out after a near-death experience in 2006. Pronovost began her work in activism in Massachusetts and partnered with a variety of organizations where she worked to help the queer community in areas such as LGBTQ+ education, housing, and hospital rights. She also worked for the Transgender Law Center and the Trans Lifeline. Now residing in Vista, CA, Pronovost is a staff member at the North Country LGBTQ+ Resource Center, where she works as a case manager for Unicorn Homes, chairs the Gender Advocacy Project, and is a grant writer. Julia Friedman: Okay. Today is Friday, April eighth, 2022 at 10:02 AM. I am Julia Friedman, a graduate student at California State University San Marcos. And today, I am interviewing Leea Pronovost for the University Library, Special Collections Oral History Project. Leea, thank you for being with me here today. Leea Pronovost: Oh, thank you for having me. Friedman: I would first like to start by asking when and where were you born? Pronovost: I was born in 1959, October second in Springfield, Massachusetts. Friedman: And can you please describe your childhood? Pronovost: (laughs) Well it wasn&#039 ; t exactly a very pleasant childhood, let&#039 ; s put it that way. One of my earliest memories was actually in 1963, I was four years old and at a Christmas party at my grandmother&#039 ; s house. And I saw my grandmother used to give us little money cards every Christmas--all of her grandchildren. And I noticed my name on an envelope my mother was holding. And I asked her what that word was in front of my name. My grandmother had written &quot ; Master.&quot ; And I didn&#039 ; t know that word--I didn&#039 ; t. So, she told me what it was, that it was a &quot ; Master&quot ; and what it stood for. And then I saw she had my little sister&#039 ; s envelope in her hand and I asked her what was in front of my little sister&#039 ; s name because of what&#039 ; s different than mine. And, uh, it was &quot ; Miss&quot ; and I asked her what that meant. And I said, I basically said, &quot ; There&#039 ; s something wrong here.&quot ; And I think, &quot ; I&#039 ; m supposed to be more like the &#039 ; Miss.&#039 ; &quot ; (laughs) So after her explanation of which each one of those terms meant. As you can imagine that was 1963. So, (laughs) a whole different world. And my mother basically told me to shut up and never talk about it again. Which, you know, because we actually started getting into an argument about it in front of all my aunts and uncles and cousins. And so that&#039 ; s why she told me that. And honestly, I never did talk with her about it again. She actually died before I ever had a chance to, so. That&#039 ; s one of my earliest memories. After that it didn&#039 ; t get much better dealing with that issue. I mean, I was raised very strict Catholic. I was an alter boy. I, um, in my teen year, even, I spent a lot of time in a Jesuit monastery trying to pray that away if you will. And even thought about going into the seminary at one point and becoming a Catholic priest. But I didn&#039 ; t, I ended up joining the Navy. But that&#039 ; s (laughs) another story. So, the--and my father wasn&#039 ; t exactly the nicest of people. He was very much, as you can imagine, a bigoted person, against gays and people like me. I can remember being a kid and hearing about Christine Jorgensen [the first transgender woman in the United States to attain fame for receiving a sex reassignment surgery] and some of the remarks that my father talked to about when he referred to her and were--made me feel very terrible about myself because I knew that&#039 ; s how I felt. So, it wasn&#039 ; t an easy time, believe me. But that&#039 ; s pretty much my basic childhood. Friedman: Well thank you for sharing that, Leea. I&#039 ; m sorry that you had such a difficult time growing up. Pronovost: Well, it was a totally different world compared to what we have now. Being transgender wasn&#039 ; t--I didn&#039 ; t even, I don&#039 ; t think that word even existed until, you know, the 1990s. At some point, I mean, people like me, they used to call them &quot ; transsexuals,&quot ; which nowadays a lot of the trans community considers that a derogatory term, so. And--but that&#039 ; s the way our society was back then. I mean, I can even tell you that in 1977, I joined the Navy, um, give you--for instance. And when I joined the Navy on my ASVAB, I scored in the top five percent in the nation and they gave me two strikes for going into bootcamp, one strike for coming out of bootcamp. And I was placed into, um, nuclear engineering program to be a nuclear engineer on a sub, and all my life, probably about 1965, I actually started cross dressing, borrowing my sister&#039 ; s clothes, because it made me feel better. But yet there was a certain amount of shame with that. So--but that continued on even into the Navy. And I can remember being on a leave of absence, going to a bar dressed up, and coming out of the bar and being discovered by my commanding officer who then proceeded to file charges against me for crossdressing. And I ended up going through a court-marshal. So, push came to shove, they didn&#039 ; t do what they call a Section 8 on me. What they did do was give me a personal hardship discharge, because they basically said they didn&#039 ; t want &quot ; my kind&quot ; there. So, but it was very nerve-wracking. I can remember thinking--and I was living in Massachusetts at the time. I&#039 ; m like thinking throughout the entire court-marshal worst case scenario, they Section 8 me, classify me as, you know, &quot ; mentally disturbed,&quot ; because of my crossdressing. And if I had went back to Massachusetts with that on my discharge papers, they could have (laughs) at actually put me into a mental institution back then. They still had governmental-run mental institutions in Massachusetts then, and they were not a very pretty sight. And even with people like me, they would actually--and gay people--they would actually lobotomize them trying to &quot ; fix them,&quot ; so to speak. So, (laugh) it wasn&#039 ; t, it was a totally different world. And I can, you know, they appreciate all the things that, people like me and the whole, uh, gay movement, gay rights and people that fought for and the seventies and even into the eighties and are still fighting today. And I&#039 ; m one of them. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: Because no matter how far we&#039 ; ve come, there&#039 ; s still much further to go. So. Friedman: I would actually like to switch gears if that&#039 ; s okay and talk about your years in activism. You&#039 ; ve been an activist within the transgender community for twelve years. When did you first decide to turn to activism? Pronovost: Well, after I felt--after I came out to everybody, um--let me explain. In 2006, I had a near death experience that actually--because as I told you, you know, from 1963 on--I knew something was different. 2006, I had a near death experience that caused me to look at what my life was about, who I am, why I survived. And I came to the realization that I had to do something about this. And I started my transition soon as I recovered from that, which was probably about a year after that. I was well enough to actually--I didn&#039 ; t start hormones at that time, but I started looking at herbal supplements that would change my body. And I didn&#039 ; t come out to everybody. My current ex-wife at the time, I did come out to her about changing. And she was okay with it as long as I didn&#039 ; t tell anybody. She carried--being a Latin person, carried a certain stigmatization around who I was. So, um, but anyway, it took me a couple of years to get on hormones and there&#039 ; s even stories there (laughs). I was actually denied my hormones at one point in time by my therapist, which really--I didn&#039 ; t understand why. I understood that that was the laws. And then, you know, I&#039 ; ve heard other stories of other going to support groups and talking to a therapist and learning how to come out to basically the world. And it troubled me how difficult it was. And that whole path of trying to-- knowing deep down inside (laughs) all my life, that something was different, just never realized what it was and because I grew up before internet. And so, it the only place I could find information was in a library. And I was too ashamed to go into a library and pull a book about transsexuals (laughs), you know? Especially with my Catholic upbringing. So, it was very difficult and there were many times that throughout my life that I actually tried to commit suicide because of that. Because I thought I was alone. I thought I different. I never knew there was people like me. And then finding all those hurdles that I had to jump through. And then at the same time, you know, I started discovering that the state that I live in, Massachusetts, didn&#039 ; t even have any protections for transgender people. And if I tried to rent an apartment or buy a house, or, you know, get a job as a trans person, people could actually say &quot ; No,&quot ; because I was transgender. So, these things really disturbed me down to my core because, you know, it is who I am. It is my identity. So, that&#039 ; s what really got me to become more active and become an advocate and activist for the community because I wanted to make it better for the next people. I want to make it better for the next generation, so they don&#039 ; t have to struggle like I did. Not knowing who they were. I wanted to give the trans community that visibility so that they have role models that can even, you know, that they can idolize basically, and say, &quot ; I want be like that person.&quot ; Because as a youth, you know, I never had that. We, I mean, if you look in the sixties, seventies and eighties, the people that were portrayed as trans-- what we now call transgender or transsexuals-- in those times, they were either the joke of the movie or they were, you know, the crazed maniac killer (laughs), you know? And I would look at them and I would say, &quot ; Oh, that&#039 ; s me when I grow up.&quot ; But yet, then I find out that they&#039 ; re either the joke or they&#039 ; re, you know, the crazed maniac killer. And I&#039 ; m like, &quot ; Okay, well, that&#039 ; s not me.&quot ; So, I&#039 ; m not like that, but you know, here I am, that&#039 ; s who I was. So, I wanted to be able to give, you know, the next generation, the next batch of people, because I--after going to a bunch of support groups for being transgender-- I realized that I wasn&#039 ; t alone and there&#039 ; s a lot more people out there that are like me. And once I started doing my history research, you know, of transgender people--for instance, we&#039 ; ve been around forever. I mean, I can tell you, in the Neolithic Age there was art drawings on cave walls of a third sex. And, you know, that date back to about 7,000 BC. So, (laughs) people like me, I&#039 ; ve been around forever (laughs). It&#039 ; s just so something that hasn&#039 ; t been known, that&#039 ; s all, at least to the Western world. Because you take, you know--actually to be truthful with you, I identify as Two Spirit. The Indigenous people--not just here in North America--but Indigenous people all around the world have some of them have multiple genders. Two Spirit is an in North American Indigenous term that encompasses some tribes have as many as five genders, some three genders. Friedman: Wow. Pronovost: There&#039 ; s some tribes that don&#039 ; t even acknowledge gender. Men and women didn&#039 ; t have specific rules, if you will. I know of a tribe in Africa that, you know--I met a girl years ago, a trans girl from Africa. She had no concept of what he/she [pronouns] meant. They only had one pronoun for all people in her language. So, it was very difficult for her and even than her mother to understand that concept when they moved here to the United States. So. Friedman: Wow. That&#039 ; s really interesting. And I&#039 ; m glad that you finally found a community when you first came out. When you first started, um, your working in activism, did you partner with any organizations during these early years and what type-- what type of activities did you participate in? Pronovost: Oh, I partnered with many organizations to be truthful with you. One of the first groups--the two first groups that I partnered with were a group called Tri Ess [an international support group for heterosexual cross-dressers and their partners and families.]. It was actually started in the 1950s by a woman named Virginia Prince. Basically, that was for, in her terms, heterosexual cross-dressers. Although once I became involved in the club, found out that there were a lot of transgender people within the organization that wanted to actually transition. Not that I wouldn&#039 ; t say myself, I would say that cross-dressers do fall under the trans umbrellas, so to speak. So, but, some, some of them don&#039 ; t agree with that, some of them do agree with it. Some of them think they&#039 ; re the only true trans people, when you really get down to the nitty gritty. One of the other main things was the transgender group of Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts. I--that was a peer support group and we were active in helping others find out that--because one of the toughest things that I found was in talking to new people as they come into the groups that they always thought they were alone as well. Because they never knew anybody that was like them. So, you know, that made such a difference for me in my life to realize all of a sudden, &quot ; Hey, they&#039 ; re like me and you know what, they&#039 ; re okay. That&#039 ; s an engineer, that&#039 ; s a medical doctor and that&#039 ; s a lawyer,&quot ; you know? &quot ; This person, you know, is, you know, just a normal average person living their life (laughs) so it&#039 ; s not so bad.&quot ; So, it made such a difference in the world for me that it, you know, it just, it seemed like common sense to move into it. And then I mean, I blossomed into a bunch of other organizations. I, uh, (laughs), I didn&#039 ; t start my transition into late in life, as you can imagine. Born in [19]59 and starting in 2007. It was forty-seven or forty-eight years old or something like that. But the thing is it, they, it--I wanted to do as much as I could for, or wherever. And so not being of (laughs)--I decided to help another group called Rainbow Elders. That was a nonprofit group run by, uh, not another nonprofit, that they did stuff for seniors. I can&#039 ; t remember their name off of top of my head, but it-- we used to do things like go out on panels and teach medical facilities. We would teach nursing homes. We would teach assisted living centers. We were teaching people in, um, it just reaching out to all sorts of businesses and stuff and doing panels and educating them about the LBGT experience by telling our stories. Then, you know, I joined another group over at UMass Amherst and, I--that was the Stonewall Speakers Bureau. And they were very active within the GSAs [Gay Straight Alliance]. So, I used to go out to all the GSAs, whether it was a grammar school, middle school, junior high school, high school, and sometimes even other colleges, asking us to come out and speak to gender-related studies and/or education of the faculty. So, and then I started--because the group--that Pioneer Valley group and the Tri Ess group that I first started with--one of them was up in New Hampshire, even though I lived in Massachusetts and the other one was in the Southern part of Massachusetts. So, I was having a drive, you know, anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour, sometimes even two hours to go to a meeting. So, I decided to create my own peer support group, which I partnered with a hospital in Western Mass[achussets] in the county that I was in, Franklin County in Greenfield Mass. And they gave me a place to work with and a small budget. And I was able to start a group that actually still runs today, even though I&#039 ; m here in California now. So, then because I also became part of what was known as the Massachusetts Transgendered Political Coalition, which in 2011, we ended up fighting for transgender rights. They made us actually take off on the bill by the time it--in order to get it out of committee, we had to take off transgender public accommodations rights. But it--bill did still encompass our rights to financial institutions, our rights for housing, our rights for, uh, financial housing and employment. Those were the three main rights that we were fighting for. Which it did end up getting passed in 2011 by the end of that year. Uh, they became-- (both talking at once) Friedman: (both talking at once)--Oh, congratulations. Pronovost: Yeah, thanks. But then again, in another organization that I became part of back in 2016, I helped to--we went back and lobbied or advocated for the state government to include transgender public accommodations, which would give us the--most people think, &quot ; Oh, that&#039 ; s the bathroom stuff and locker room stuff,&quot ; but there&#039 ; s so much more to it when you really sit down and think about it. The right to ride on a public transportation, the right to, (laughs), let&#039 ; s say I worked in a restaurant. If I punched out my time card to go out the back employee door and walk around to the front of that restaurant that hired me, they still have the right to refuse to serve me. Those are actually public accommodations. The right to be served in a hospital, you know? Many times throughout the years that I&#039 ; ve worked, I&#039 ; ve had myself and my friends have had discrimination by going to a hospital. I had one friend that they fell down on black ice and she got taken away on an ambulance and when they tore off or cut off her clothes, they found that she had a penis. And the doctor just looked at her and said--and then looked at the nurses and said, &quot ; Get that thing out of my hospital.&quot ; So, she--they called for another ambulance to take her to another hospital. Nowadays, because of that (unintelligible) she&#039 ; s permanently disabled, because she didn&#039 ; t receive the proper attention. And now, you know, we as taxpayers are paying to support her because of that discrimination. And so, things like that just didn&#039 ; t make any sense to me. So, you know, it made sense to go back and fight. So, we formed another organization called Freedom Massachusetts. And we fought for trans rights and we won them. But also, because of all that other activism, I had other organizations like PFLAG [organization dedicated to supporting the LGBTQ+ community ; formally known as Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays] and, uh, PFLAG in two separate counties, both of them had asked me on to be on their board of directors. So, I ended up being on their board of directors at the same time about the--that same time I had many friends that I lost over the years in the support groups. And when I say I lost them, I mean that they took their own lives. And they&#039 ; re no longer here. And prior to my transition, I never knew anybody that committed suicide. Now, all of a sudden in the few short years that I was out as a trans person, I knew more than half a dozen. And I just felt that was wrong. So, I had heard about a organization called Trans Lifeline, and I actually became an operator for them. And because I, myself, (laughs), had, as I told you before, early in my life, I didn&#039 ; t know how to deal with this. I didn&#039 ; t know there were other people like me, there were a few times that I&#039 ; d tried to commit suicide. So, and if I-- so if I could prevent one trans person from (laughs) stop--help-- stop them from committing suicide, then, you know, that would make me feel great. So, I spent a number of years as an operator, and then I actually became a team lead for a bunch of operators. Actually, even given peer support to the operators, because if you can imagine Trans Lifeline was an organization that was created by transgender people, for trans gender people. And the only criteria was that you had to be trans to be an operator. What helped was, though most of the operators were ones that had tried to commit suicide at one point or another. And sometimes when you&#039 ; re talking somebody down from a suicidal attempt, it brings you yourself into some pretty dark places. So, the operators would definitely need some, you know, self-care and guidance to get back to a point where they can do self-care even. And I know that I have many cases that led me into dark places that I didn&#039 ; t want to go, but yet, I went there to try and make sure, and it makes a difference. It really does, the peer thing, because I&#039 ; ve never lost anyone when I was talking with them. When an individual that&#039 ; s on that brink or on that fence, or standing on that (laughs) that [precipice] to jump, if you will. Having somebody else talk to you, that&#039 ; s been there and been through what your experiencing, makes a huge difference. And they open up and listen. And then they also feel much easier to open up to you so that they can pour those feelings out and step off that [precipice]. So, that was really nice work for me. And then the next thing that I (laughs) became active in was the Transgender Law Center up in Oakland, California. I started volunteering for what they call the Detention Project. The Detention Project is basically--there&#039 ; s a lot of transgender people within our prison system that either wanted to transition or had already started their transition and they&#039 ; re wondering, you know, &quot ; Here you have this trans woman sitting in a male jail, what are her rights?&quot ; Um, you know, and, &quot ; Can she have her name change? Can she get women&#039 ; s clothing? Can be isolated so she&#039 ; s protected away from the general population?&quot ; All of these things and Transgender Law Center addresses all of those issues. I was basically a research person for the lawyers and I would actually go and research each individual state&#039 ; s laws pertaining to the detention of transgender people, and then compose letters. And the lawyers would then approve or ask me, you know, change this, change that. And then we would issue the letters back to the inmates, so that they knew what their rights were and how to fund those rights. So, which meant a lot to me (laughs) the next step phase in my, uh, was actually working with the local because I was doing on the national level. And I started working with the local county jails and state prisons, and department of corrections. And I helped them to write--I helped both Massachusetts and Connecticut to write their policies on transgender people. And then--the same way with most of the county jail systems, I helped them to write--and I ran peer support groups within the county jails as well, so. Then I met a woman online (laughs) and moved out here to California (laughs). Well, it, it took a while. It took a few years, it--we had a Coast-to-Coast relationship, and we developed this great relationship. And we decided to take it to the next level and move in together. And I tried to get her to come out to Massachusetts, but one point she came out and it was minus--the high temperature was minus fifteen degrees. And this was the week between Christmas and New Year&#039 ; s. So, she was like, &quot ; No, no, no, no.&quot ; (both laugh) So, of course I&#039 ; ve moved out here, and been living here ever since then. But before I even moved out, once we made that decision to move out here, I was like, &quot ; You know, I&#039 ; m an--I&#039 ; m an advocate and activist. What do you have out there that I can get involved with?&quot ; So, she introduced me to the North County--she was living in Oceanside at the time, and she introduced me to the North County LGBTQ Resource Center. So, I met Max Disposti, the Director and Founder of the place. And I was like, &quot ; What can I do to come?&quot ; (laughs) You know? &quot ; What can I do when I get out here?&quot ; (laughs) &quot ; Where can I go?&quot ; He&#039 ; s like, &quot ; Don&#039 ; t worry, we&#039 ; ll put you to work.&quot ; So, (both laugh) soon as I moved out here, they had an opening for the Unicorn Homes program, which being a case manager for that program, it was only fifteen hours a week. But, to start, and I was like, &quot ; Hey, it&#039 ; s along the lines,&quot ; because a lot of times running the peer support group in prisons, I was helping people do a lot of navigate social services that they would need getting out of jail. So, it wasn&#039 ; t too far of a fetch for me to be able to help people, you know, navigate applying for Medi-Cal or, you know, Cal Fresh or being there just to listen and try to help homeless youth. And one of the things, even in Massachusetts, that one of my goals was eventually to create a transgender housing service. So, when I moved here and I had that opportunity to join something like this, I jumped on it. And Max liked what he saw in all the volunteer work that I did. So, he hired me for the position, even though there were a number of other candidates, I received the job. And I just started doing a whole bunch of free work for them (laughs). Because this is where my passion is. In the meantime, you know, I had been, you know, I still own property back East in Massachusetts, rental property. And, you know, I had a nice package of--so I wasn&#039 ; t worried about money or anything. So, why not work where my heart is? Nowadays though, I do a whole bunch of other things for The Center. I manage most of the grants for The Center. I also, now am, uh, Gender Advocacy Project Chair person for the Gender Advocacy Project, which puts on a number of events a year they do--we just recently had the Transgender Day of Visibility a couple weekends ago. Well, this weekend will be two weekends ago. Which was a wonderful event. We had, I don&#039 ; t know if I had to guess probably around 200, maybe 300 people come through and a bunch of booth with resources. And we had a great show. We had speakers and musicians and playing, and we had fun and games for the youth, and it was just a wonderful weekend. Wonderful day. But, so. Gender Advocacy Project also does Transgender Day of Remembrance. And, which is in November twentieth and a rather somber day for us because we&#039 ; re remembering those that we lost through transphobic violence. And the past few years have been actually kind of tough because the numbers have gone up astronomically in 2020, if I remember correctly, there was forty-one or forty-two, and in 2021, I believe there was fifty-six trans women. Now when I say these numbers, they seem like small numbers compared to a nationwide thing, but those are the ones that we actually know. Which, you know, a lot of times the gender is not known and, and they--or, and/or they misgender the person because the family doesn&#039 ; t want them to know about it. So, that number, even though the known cases keeps going up, I&#039 ; m sure it&#039 ; s at least doubled if not tripled. So for-- for supposedly, according to the statistics, there&#039 ; s less than one percent of people are transgender throughout the nation. So, for that small amount of people to be targeted, the numbers of murders like that--violent murders--basically hate crimes, in my opinion, that&#039 ; s an astronomical amount. When you start looking at the statistics and the breakouts. Especially that most of those numbers, you know--I carry a certain amount of privilege because I&#039 ; m a white transgender woman--or I appear to be white. I do have some American heritage, um, Indigenous blood in me. But that&#039 ; s something that people don&#039 ; t see because I appear to be white. So, therefore I&#039 ; ve got a certain amount of privilege. I know that. When I look at a trans woman of color, those are the ones that are targeted when you look at those people that we honor year after year after year. It&#039 ; s usually Black or Brown people, and occasionally an Indigenous person in there. But, um, and sprinkled with a few Caucasian people. So, you know, it&#039 ; s so that when you look at that target population, that number, even it&#039 ; s more astronomical, when you break it down to what I call the &quot ; intersectionality of marginalizations.&quot ; So, you know, that&#039 ; s why that particular day is so important to me, even though it&#039 ; s a somber day. And I&#039 ; m glad that we celebrate that and celebrate those lives that we lost. I&#039 ; m hoping one day (laughs) and trying to do our best by fighting the hate. One of the grants that the North County LGBTQ Resource Center just got it is--we got a bunch of money into actually--and that&#039 ; s what the grant is called, &quot ; Fight the Hate.&quot ; (laughs) So, you know, it&#039 ; s an honor for me to be doing this work and nowadays I&#039 ; m actually paid full time for what I do, because I do the grants. I do the Unicorn Homes. I&#039 ; m also the Gender Advocacy Project Chair. I&#039 ; m also--it, I never mentioned what I did prior to, well, while all that activation was going on, activism and advocacy work was going on, I actually worked a full-time job in telecommunications. I was a Level III Telecommunications Engineer. So, now I do all the IT work (laughs) at The Center as well. So, (both laugh), anything I can do for the community, you know, to make their life better. And, you know, I&#039 ; m, uh, want to, you know, the North County LGBTQ Resource Center, I feel like I&#039 ; m privileged to be able to work there, to be honest with you. And to be able to work in such a queer environment where I don&#039 ; t have to face what all my siblings face on a daily basis, you know? Because, despite all the work that we&#039 ; ve done, there&#039 ; s still a lot of stigmatization, and even hatred of the trans community. It&#039 ; s funny how, you know, one of the things, when you&#039 ; ve learned the history, it was, you know, of the entire gay rights movement. One of--they say that turning point was Stonewall, right? Well, the first person to actually throw something at the police was actually a transgender woman. And the other trans girls started in. And then if you know, I know people that were actually there and they told me that basically the lesbians then started joining in. And it was at the encouragement of the lesbians that the gay men finally stood up and started doing something against the police. So, if you look at that in its context who, it--that key moment who was the first trans woman? But in gay rights movements, we were left behind. We were taken out because we were so controversial and they wouldn&#039 ; t be able to get their rights. That&#039 ; s what we were told as trans women or transgender people. If we were in clumped in with them, you know? So, even though we were there at the beginning and even well before that, you know, a lot of--there, there were riots all over the country, you know? If you look at San Francisco, if you look at Miami, there were riots in gay bars where trans women--and trans women were the target, because a lot of the women, because they couldn&#039 ; t get jobs were street workers. So, therefore they&#039 ; re trying to pick up these supposedly &quot ; men&quot ; that dress as &quot ; women,&quot ; which at the time was against the law, working as a sex worker. So, it&#039 ; s because of that attraction that the trans women stood up and then the lesbians stood up with them, and then the gay guys stood up with them. And yet, here they are fighting for their rights and telling us to step back. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: You know, it just didn&#039 ; t make sense. And believe it or not, there&#039 ; s still quite a few lesbian--for instance, I&#039 ; m with another woman, I consider--I&#039 ; m sexually attracted to other women. I&#039 ; m romantically attracted to other women. Not so much with the guys. So, I consider myself basically a lesbian. There&#039 ; s a lot of lesbians out there that would tell me I&#039 ; m not a lesbian because I&#039 ; m a trans woman. These are what we would call TERFS: trans-exclusionary radical feminists. And they&#039 ; re out there all over the world, you know? One of the most famous and most recent news is J.K. Rowling. (laughs) Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: So, (laughs) despite all the love for, you know, the Harry Potter stories, I have to disagree with her principles. So, you know, so there&#039 ; s still--my point is despite all the fighting and activism and how far we&#039 ; ve actually come, we still have a huge way to go. So Friedman: That actually leads me to my next question. Um, do you think creating an inclusive society is achievable? Pronovost: (both laugh) Honestly, I hope so. You know, one of the latest endeavors that I&#039 ; ve looked into is--and I hope I&#039 ; m not premature in saying this. I&#039 ; ve been appointed, still yet to be confirmed--a Senior Commissioner for the City of--Senior Affairs Commissioner for the City of Vista. So, I&#039 ; m doing my part to hopefully make that true. I don&#039 ; t think it&#039 ; ll happen in my lifetime. I am much older than (laughs) most people nowadays. I am a senior, hence why I&#039 ; m on that (laughs) Senior Affairs Commission. Or want to be on it. So, and as of lately, there&#039 ; s more and more transgender people within the political scheme, trying to fight the battle from within, which will hopefully eventually bring that about. I mean, that&#039 ; s my ultimate goal. One of the reasons why I do stuff like this, this oral history presentation, or any of my activism--a lot of it is educational. I have a pet peeve that, you know, education brings in tolerance. Tolerance can achieve, hopefully, acceptance. And once acceptance is there, in a general population, then the next thing that that should beget is inclusion. And that&#039 ; s where me, that&#039 ; s my goal. (laughs) Since coming out and becoming an activist, that&#039 ; s--that&#039 ; s my life--that&#039 ; s my life goal, if you will. I know I probably will not see it in my lifetime within the next twenty or so years. I hope we still achieve, you know, steps moving in that direction as we go. One of the things that the Biden administration just recently did, was give, uh, make the announcement on Transgender Day of Visibility, which is March thirty-first. They made an announcement that they were going to allow an X marker on the passports for a third gender. They were going to make it much easier for a person like me who, you know, I was identified male at birth, but yet, I&#039 ; m a woman, make it much easier for somebody like me to change that name and gender marker on the passport. Another thing that they were planning on doing was one of the really bad areas that--and a lot of us had been fighting against this, the TSA--when you go through TSA screening in an airport and you have the x-ray, um, it&#039 ; s happened to me, you know? I identify as a woman, all my IDs are women and they see something down below. And they call you out, &quot ; Hey, we&#039 ; ve got an anomaly. You need to step aside over here and we need to get somebody to physically search you.&quot ; Friedman: That&#039 ; s awful. Pronovost: So, they&#039 ; re going to do away with that genderized screening. Which is an awesome thing. Finally, thank God. Because it&#039 ; s so embarrassing, you know, when that happens. And it happens to so many people, it&#039 ; s ridiculous what we have to endure and by being identified that way. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: So, that, that was a step in the right direction. They&#039 ; re looking at making the Affordable Care Act more inclusive for gender treatment, especially one of the things that we recently did as the Gender Advocacy Project, which is the program of the North County LGBTQ Resource Center. I--one of my volunteers put together a list of all the state bills. For instance--what I mean by that is, last year in 2021, we had one hundred and ninety-one hate bills. Most of them were targeting transgender people. And in particular transgendered youth and their ability to receive transgender healthcare. Me, working on Trans Lifeline, know that most of those phone calls that I used to get in on Trans Lifeline are trans youth, anticipating and wanting to commit suicide. If they were accepted and were allowed to get their hormones, though, those numbers would drop drastically. And we have the statistics to back that up. But here, these states are wanting to outlaw and actually go even--go after doctors. And look at Texas. Texas wants to, you know, go after the parents saying that gender-affirmation healthcare for their child is actually child abuse, you know? So, one of the things the Biden administration said was they were going to fight, that they were going to make the Affordable Care Act to protect so that doctors don&#039 ; t have to report that to state agencies. Because they, you know, the state agencies, the state Texas--state of Texas, was forcing the doctors to violate people&#039 ; s HIPAA rights. I mean, they have no right to that information, but yet the state&#039 ; s forcing the doctors to turn that over. HIPAA&#039 ; s a national law, It&#039 ; s not a state law (laughs). They shouldn&#039 ; t be able to bypass federal laws. So, the Biden administration, uh, pledge to make it more difficult for states to be able to do stuff like that. You look at the &quot ; Don&#039 ; t Say Gay Bill&quot ; in Florida [SB 1834: Parental Rights in Education], you know? Ohio just came out with a bill last week--or just earlier this week, I forget which--that basically mimics the exact wording of Florida&#039 ; s bill. And no one, the state of Ohio and who they are and their history, that will pass, you know? So, we&#039 ; re going to have a couple of states that, you know, people are not allowed to say &quot ; You&#039 ; re gay.&quot ; There&#039 ; s another state in Utah. Utah wrote a bill that&#039 ; s very similar to Texas&#039 ; s bill about transgender healthcare, but it actually even encompasses adults. So, they want to make it illegal to be me (laughs), you know? And force--trying to force us to go back into the closet, so to speak. Because like I said, you know, one of the thing, one of their arguments is, &quot ; Oh, it&#039 ; s become a &#039 ; popular thing.&#039 ; &quot ; It&#039 ; s not popular. You just never knew what the real numbers were because we were all hiding away in the closet. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: So, you know. These are thing-- that&#039 ; s why I say we still have so far to go. This particular year though, in the first three months of this year, we have two hundred and thirty-eight hate bills. So, we even-- last year was a record year with all the hate bills, but in three months&#039 ; time, we have surpassed all of the bills from last year. So, they&#039 ; re--the thing that I&#039 ; m looking at is I&#039 ; m hoping this is like the last grasp (laughs) of them. (both laugh), you know? Their desperation before they fall down into the cracking crevice and go wherever. Friedman: I hope. Pronovost: (laughs) Go away. Yeah. Well, that&#039 ; s my hope (laughs). Because, you know, if you look at the statistics throughout the entire United States as a nation, over sixty percent of the nation is for transgendered people and having our rights or rights in particular of LGBT people. So, that&#039 ; s more than half the population. So eventually I know we will get there because that acceptance number and because, you know, I see the trends: tolerance, acceptance, then inclusion. I know we&#039 ; ll get there, but we still have so far to go. So, um, yeah. I hope that--I hope that answers your question (laughs). Friedman: Oh, absolutely. Kind of going back to politics, Like throughout your time, working on the East Coast and the West Coast, have you kind of noticed a difference in the politics working on both Coasts? Or, has it just kind of depended, um, kind of like the political shifts because you kind of were mostly on the on the East Coast? Um, is it kind of-- does it not really matter because you kind of just, you mostly on the East Coast for most of your life and--? Pronovost: Um, be honest with you, knowing, I don&#039 ; t think it&#039 ; s that much of a difference here, you know. Here at times, I think there&#039 ; s certain pockets you, that if you will, that are actually inclusive. When I look at the city of Oceanside, for instance, you know? I had mayor Esther Sanchez come out to Transgender Day of Visibility and she gave a speech about being visible and standing up for what&#039 ; s right, you know? And, so I see Oceanside as a pocket, but yet, when I look at a city like Vista where I actually live, you know? Vista is, you know, for lack of better terminology, very conservative. But then there&#039 ; s even worse conservative areas. Like, you start pushing up into Menifee or something like that, you know? You&#039 ; re looking at very, um, I don&#039 ; t like to use this because I don&#039 ; t like to use somebody&#039 ; s name, but it very much what most of us within the community would consider to be Trumpers or people that propagate hate. And I hate using that because I don&#039 ; t like to talk about individuals or refer to that. But that term, let&#039 ; s take it away from the person because that term existed, uh, &quot ; Trumping somebody&quot ; is overcoming is somebody. So that&#039 ; s what I mean by that terminology, more or less. Where they are totally conservative. And actually, even don&#039 ; t like people like me. You know, I&#039 ; ve had people up there in that city actually reach out to me saying they&#039 ; re having troubles with their school systems. Now here in California, for a transgender person and they should--a student should be able to change their name on all information except for their transcripts. That&#039 ; s the only thing that they can&#039 ; t change because that&#039 ; s a legal document, but they should be able to walk in without the school notifying the parents that, &quot ; Hey, I no longer want to be called Jane. I want to be called Max.&quot ; And the school legally is obligated to change their paperwork. Friedman: I see. Pronovost: But yet that&#039 ; s not happening in a city like that. I get phone calls quite often saying that the school is fighting the individual or the school has actually outed the individual to the parents, even. Because some of these schools aren&#039 ; t, you know, minors are even protected from this, the school is not supposed to out the youth. But yet here we have it happening, you know? And you know, it--so the hate and the stigmatization and the indignities and the discrimination still happens. No matter where you are and back East, I happen to live in a pocket--that Pioneer Valley group that I belong to. That&#039 ; s the whole Connecticut River Valley area throughout all of Western Mass. And that was very progressive. I mean, we--there&#039 ; s a town called Northampton there, which it is kind of, uh, was the gay city for the East Coast kind of equivalent to what San Francisco is to here. So, it&#039 ; s mainly a college town, but that made the entire whole (laughs), excuse me, for lack of better terminology, Pioneer Valley seemed very, uh, &quot ; granola-ish,&quot ; if you will. Originally Pioneer Valley, that whole Connecticut River Valley, those were the first communes back in the sixties. They started there and then moved out here to the West Coast. So, (laughs), very similar, you know, because even in Massachusetts, you still had your pockets of hate and bigotry and, so. It&#039 ; s very similar. The fight&#039 ; s the same, no matter where (laughs) I seem to go. But, you know, the goal is to get more cities, you know, to be like Oceanside, you know? Because Oceanside they&#039 ; ve raise, you know, they do raise a pride flag. Here in Vista, the pride flag that (laughs) that rainbow flag&#039 ; s never been raised here in the City of Vista. And so, you know, I&#039 ; m hoping that maybe sitting on one of the commissions, (laughs) I can change that (laughs) from within. And so, you know. Friedman: Well, I just have one more question. Pronovost: Okay. Friedman: Um, so you, you&#039 ; ve already talked about it. You have a wonderful year--a wonderful career in activism. What have you learned throughout your twelve years working in the trans and LGBT field of activism? Pronovost: Oh, (laughs), I&#039 ; ve learned so much it&#039 ; s hard to pinpoint any one thing. I think the one that weighs the heaviest on my heart, if you will, is probably--you know, one of the things that early on people did mention about the intersectionality of marginalizations and now that I&#039 ; ve had, you know, more than ten years at this, I actually get to see it. And that breaks my heart. How, you know, for instance, you know, I worked as a Telecom Engineer and I was the Senior Telecom Engineer for one of the world&#039 ; s largest telecommunications companies, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph [Nippon Telegraph and Telephone]. The first time I walked into an engineering meeting as me, as Leea, they looked at me like, you know, I-- &quot ; Where where&#039 ; s the donuts and coffee?&quot ; (laughs). That was the type of look I got. And, &quot ; Who the hell are you to be sitting here in this engineering meeting?&quot ; When, you know, before I used to lead the engineering meeting, you know? So, I know the difference between being a man in a man&#039 ; s field and being a woman trying to make it in a man&#039 ; s field. And, and so I don&#039 ; t--[connection froze]--People that I serve doing what I do and I look at, you know, a trans woman of color, and I see how much more discrimination that they actually face. Because of that intersectionality. Now you start adding more intersectionalities on top of that, such as being disabled or mentally disabled, you know? Disadvantaged. That--those numbers not only do--I mean, they grow exponentially and that&#039 ; s what weighs really heavy on my heart. And now I see that so much more easily, and makes me want to fight all that much or for them, you know? But also at the same time, you know, being--working at the North County LGBTQ Resource Center, and seeing other people fight for, you know, my rights as a trans woman, I want to say, you know, not for me, without me, you know? So that&#039 ; s one of--that ties well into the intersectionality thing. So, you know, I know I can&#039 ; t go out there. I can mention about it, but I can&#039 ; t go out there and say, &quot ; You know, we need more protections for trans women of color.&quot ; I can say that, but, you know, I don&#039 ; t experience that because I do have that privilege. I can talk from that privilege that we need to do something about it, you know? So, but I want those, I want to be able to empower those trans women of color to come forward and speak up for themselves. I want to, you know, empower other people to do what I do so that the fight you, I know I&#039 ; m not going to achieve my goal in my lifetime so that I know the legacy I leave behind is me helping them empower themselves so that they can even empower other people and move it forward. So, that&#039 ; s the main thing I&#039 ; ve learned is that we have to give people the power to have that voice. So, it isn&#039 ; t just about any one person, it&#039 ; s about empowering an entire demographic, if you will. Friedman: Well, thank you. Is there anything else I should have asked or anything else that you would like to share today? Pronovost: Well, geez, we&#039 ; ve covered so much. (both laugh). I don&#039 ; t know. I don&#039 ; t think so. I think we pretty much covered it. It&#039 ; s a lot to chew and digest, if you will. So, I think, I think we&#039 ; ve done a good job. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: So. Friedman: Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today, Leea. We are so happy to have you a part of this project. Pronovost: Yeah, my pleasure is so, um. I&#039 ; m just happy to be here. Like I said, that that&#039 ; s my pet peeve. If I can do something to--I&#039 ; m hoping this gets seen by as many people as it possibly can be. And it gives them the self-confidence in seeing somebody like me to empower themselves to find their voice. So. Friedman: Absolutely. Just continuing on with your, uh, with what you&#039 ; ve been doing from the start, basically ever since you started in 2007, 2008. Yeah. Pronovost: Yeah. Friedman: Yeah. Well, thank you again. Pronovost: You&#039 ; re very welcome. And it&#039 ; s my pleasure and thank you for having me. Friedman: Well, it&#039 ; s our pleasure (both laugh). https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en video Property rights reside with the university. Copyrights are retained by the creators of the records and their heirs. This resource is licensed for noncommercial educational use using CC NC-BY 4.0. Please contact Special Collections at archives csusm.edu if you need reproductions made. Please see the related “Preferred Citation note” for language on citing materials from this collection. Permission to examine Library materials is not authorization to publish or to reproduce the examined material in whole, or in part. Persons wishing to quote, publish, perform, reproduce, or otherwise make use of an item in the Library’s collections must assume all responsibility for identifying and satisfying any claimants of the copyright holder. The researcher assumes full responsibility for use of the material and agrees to hold harmless the University Library, and California State University, against all claims, demands, costs, and expenses incurred by copyright infringement or any other legal or regulatory cause of action arising from the use of the Library's materials. In assuming full responsibility for use of the material, the researcher also understands that the materials they examine may contain Social Security numbers, other personal identifiers, and/or sensitive material on potentially living and identifiable individuals (e.g., medical, evaluative, or personally invasive information). The researcher agrees not to record, reproduce, or disclose any Social Security number or other information of a highly personal nature that may be found. 0 https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=PronovostLeea_FriedmanJulia_2022-04-08.xml PronovostLeea_FriedmanJulia_2022-04-08.xml Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Pronovost, Leea. Interview April 8, 2022 Description An account of the resource Leea Pronovost was a transgender activist and has advocated for transgender and LGBTQIA+ rights since coming out after a near-death experience in 2006. Pronovost began her work in activism in Massachusetts and partnered with a variety of organizations where she worked to help the queer community in areas such as LGBTQ+ education, housing, and hospital rights. She also worked for the Transgender Law Center and the Trans Lifeline. Most recently residing in Vista, CA, Pronovost was a staff member at the North Country LGBTQ+ Resource Center, where she worked as a case manager for Unicorn Homes, chaired the Gender Advocacy Project, and was a grant writer. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SC027-18 Subject The topic of the resource LGBTQ+ activism LGBTQ+ rights Transgender people -- Civil rights Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-04-08 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Leea Pronovost Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Julia Friedman Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant San Diego (Calif.) Springfield (Mass.) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Language A language of the resource English Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Leea Pronovost Activists and activism Community history History Department internship LGBTQIA+ experience Women's experience https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/files/original/4cb4071e4b68b0a4322bc9e8ac6d7228.pdf e64e54578e88c9f2be9c650b7c67c406 PDF Text Text LEEA PRONOVOST TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2022-04-08 Julia Friedman: Okay. Today is Friday, April eighth, 2022 at 10:02 AM. I am Julia Friedman, a graduate student at California State University San Marcos. And today, I am interviewing Leea Pronovost for the University Library, Special Collections Oral History Project. Leea, thank you for being with me here today. Leea Pronovost: Oh, thank you for having me. Friedman: I would first like to start by asking when and where were you born? Pronovost: I was born in 1959, October second in Springfield, Massachusetts. Friedman: And can you please describe your childhood? Pronovost: (laughs) Well it wasn't exactly a very pleasant childhood, let's put it that way. One of my earliest memories was actually in 1963, I was four years old and at a Christmas party at my grandmother's house. And I saw my grandmother used to give us little money cards every Christmas--all of her grandchildren. And I noticed my name on an envelope my mother was holding. And I asked her what that word was in front of my name. My grandmother had written “Master.” And I didn't know that word--I didn't. So, she told me what it was, that it was a “Master” and what it stood for. And then I saw she had my little sister’s envelope in her hand and I asked her what was in front of my little sister’s name because of what's different than mine. And, uh, it was “Miss” and I asked her what that meant. And I said, I basically said, “There's something wrong here.” And I think, “I'm supposed to be more like the ‘Miss.’” (laughs) So after her explanation of which each one of those terms meant. As you can imagine that was 1963. So, (laughs) a whole different world. And my mother basically told me to shut up and never talk about it again. Which, you know, because we actually started getting into an argument about it in front of all my aunts and uncles and cousins. And so that's why she told me that. And honestly, I never did talk with her about it again. She actually died before I ever had a chance to, so. That's one of my earliest memories. After that it didn't get much better dealing with that issue. I mean, I was raised very strict Catholic. I was an alter boy. I, um, in my teen year, even, I spent a lot of time in a Jesuit monastery trying to pray that away if you will. And even thought about going into the seminary at one point and becoming a Catholic priest. But I didn't, I ended up joining the Navy. But that's (laughs) another story. So, the--and my father wasn't exactly the nicest of people. He was very much, as you can imagine, a bigoted person, against gays and people like me. I can remember being a kid and hearing about Christine Jorgensen [the first transgender woman in the United States to attain fame for receiving a sex reassignment surgery] and some of the remarks that my father talked to about when he referred to her and were--made me feel very terrible about myself because I knew that's how I felt. So, it wasn't an easy time, believe me. But that's pretty much my basic childhood. Transcribed by Julia Friedman 1 2022-11-08 �LEEA PRONOVOST TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2022-04-08 Friedman: Well thank you for sharing that, Leea. I'm sorry that you had such a difficult time growing up. Pronovost: Well, it was a totally different world compared to what we have now. Being transgender wasn’t--I didn't even, I don't think that word even existed until, you know, the 1990s. At some point, I mean, people like me, they used to call them “transsexuals,” which nowadays a lot of the trans community considers that a derogatory term, so. And--but that's the way our society was back then. I mean, I can even tell you that in 1977, I joined the Navy, um, give you--for instance. And when I joined the Navy on my ASVAB, I scored in the top five percent in the nation and they gave me two strikes for going into bootcamp, one strike for coming out of bootcamp. And I was placed into, um, nuclear engineering program to be a nuclear engineer on a sub, and all my life, probably about 1965, I actually started cross dressing, borrowing my sister's clothes, because it made me feel better. But yet there was a certain amount of shame with that. So--but that continued on even into the Navy. And I can remember being on a leave of absence, going to a bar dressed up, and coming out of the bar and being discovered by my commanding officer who then proceeded to file charges against me for crossdressing. And I ended up going through a court-marshal. So, push came to shove, they didn't do what they call a Section 8 on me. What they did do was give me a personal hardship discharge, because they basically said they didn't want “my kind” there. So, but it was very nerve-wracking. I can remember thinking--and I was living in Massachusetts at the time. I'm like thinking throughout the entire court-marshal worst case scenario, they Section 8 me, classify me as, you know, “mentally disturbed,” because of my crossdressing. And if I had went back to Massachusetts with that on my discharge papers, they could have (laughs) at actually put me into a mental institution back then. They still had governmental-run mental institutions in Massachusetts then, and they were not a very pretty sight. And even with people like me, they would actually--and gay people--they would actually lobotomize them trying to “fix them,” so to speak. So, (laugh) it wasn't, it was a totally different world. And I can, you know, they appreciate all the things that, people like me and the whole, uh, gay movement, gay rights and people that fought for and the seventies and even into the eighties and are still fighting today. And I'm one of them. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: Because no matter how far we've come, there's still much further to go. So. Friedman: I would actually like to switch gears if that's okay and talk about your years in activism. You've been an activist within the transgender community for twelve years. When did you first decide to turn to activism? Pronovost: Well, after I felt--after I came out to everybody, um--let me explain. In 2006, I had a near death experience that actually--because as I told you, you know, from 1963 on--I knew something was different. 2006, I had a near death experience that caused me to look at what my life was about, who I Transcribed by Julia Friedman 2 2022-11-08 �LEEA PRONOVOST TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2022-04-08 am, why I survived. And I came to the realization that I had to do something about this. And I started my transition soon as I recovered from that, which was probably about a year after that. I was well enough to actually--I didn't start hormones at that time, but I started looking at herbal supplements that would change my body. And I didn't come out to everybody. My current ex-wife at the time, I did come out to her about changing. And she was okay with it as long as I didn’t tell anybody. She carried--being a Latin person, carried a certain stigmatization around who I was. So, um, but anyway, it took me a couple of years to get on hormones and there's even stories there (laughs). I was actually denied my hormones at one point in time by my therapist, which really--I didn't understand why. I understood that that was the laws. And then, you know, I've heard other stories of other going to support groups and talking to a therapist and learning how to come out to basically the world. And it troubled me how difficult it was. And that whole path of trying to-- knowing deep down inside (laughs) all my life, that something was different, just never realized what it was and because I grew up before internet. And so, it the only place I could find information was in a library. And I was too ashamed to go into a library and pull a book about transsexuals (laughs), you know? Especially with my Catholic upbringing. So, it was very difficult and there were many times that throughout my life that I actually tried to commit suicide because of that. Because I thought I was alone. I thought I different. I never knew there was people like me. And then finding all those hurdles that I had to jump through. And then at the same time, you know, I started discovering that the state that I live in, Massachusetts, didn't even have any protections for transgender people. And if I tried to rent an apartment or buy a house, or, you know, get a job as a trans person, people could actually say “No,” because I was transgender. So, these things really disturbed me down to my core because, you know, it is who I am. It is my identity. So, that's what really got me to become more active and become an advocate and activist for the community because I wanted to make it better for the next people. I want to make it better for the next generation, so they don't have to struggle like I did. Not knowing who they were. I wanted to give the trans community that visibility so that they have role models that can even, you know, that they can idolize basically, and say, “I want be like that person.” Because as a youth, you know, I never had that. We, I mean, if you look in the sixties, seventies and eighties, the people that were portrayed as trans-- what we now call transgender or transsexuals-in those times, they were either the joke of the movie or they were, you know, the crazed maniac killer (laughs), you know? And I would look at them and I would say, “Oh, that's me when I grow up.” But yet, then I find out that they're either the joke or they're, you know, the crazed maniac killer. And I'm like, “Okay, well, that's not me.” So, I'm not like that, but you know, here I am, that's who I was. So, I wanted to be able to give, you know, the next generation, the next batch of people, because I--after going to a bunch of support groups for being transgender-- I realized that I wasn’t alone and there's a lot more people out there that are like me. And once I started doing my history research, you know, of transgender people--for instance, we've been around forever. I mean, I can tell you, in the Neolithic Age there was art drawings on cave walls of a third sex. And, you know, that date back to about 7,000 BC. So, (laughs) people like me, I've been around forever (laughs). It's just so something that hasn't been known, that's all, at least to the Western world. Because you take, you know--actually to be truthful with you, I identify as Two Spirit. The Indigenous people--not just here in North America--but Indigenous people all around the world have some of them have multiple genders. Two Spirit is an in North American Indigenous term that encompasses some tribes have as many as five genders, some three genders. Friedman: Wow. Pronovost: There's some tribes that don't even acknowledge gender. Men and women didn't have specific rules, if you will. I know of a tribe in Africa that, you know--I met a girl years ago, a trans girl Transcribed by Julia Friedman 3 2022-11-08 �LEEA PRONOVOST TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2022-04-08 from Africa. She had no concept of what he/she [pronouns] meant. They only had one pronoun for all people in her language. So, it was very difficult for her and even than her mother to understand that concept when they moved here to the United States. So. Friedman: Wow. That's really interesting. And I'm glad that you finally found a community when you first came out. When you first started, um, your working in activism, did you partner with any organizations during these early years and what type-- what type of activities did you participate in? Pronovost: Oh, I partnered with many organizations to be truthful with you. One of the first groups--the two first groups that I partnered with were a group called Tri Ess [an international support group for heterosexual cross-dressers and their partners and families.]. It was actually started in the 1950s by a woman named Virginia Prince. Basically, that was for, in her terms, heterosexual cross-dressers. Although once I became involved in the club, found out that there were a lot of transgender people within the organization that wanted to actually transition. Not that I wouldn't say myself, I would say that cross-dressers do fall under the trans umbrellas, so to speak. So, but, some, some of them don't agree with that, some of them do agree with it. Some of them think they're the only true trans people, when you really get down to the nitty gritty. One of the other main things was the transgender group of Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts. I--that was a peer support group and we were active in helping others find out that--because one of the toughest things that I found was in talking to new people as they come into the groups that they always thought they were alone as well. Because they never knew anybody that was like them. So, you know, that made such a difference for me in my life to realize all of a sudden, “Hey, they're like me and you know what, they're okay. That's an engineer, that's a medical doctor and that's a lawyer,” you know? “This person, you know, is, you know, just a normal average person living their life (laughs) so it's not so bad.” So, it made such a difference in the world for me that it, you know, it just, it seemed like common sense to move into it. And then I mean, I blossomed into a bunch of other organizations. I, uh, (laughs), I didn't start my transition into late in life, as you can imagine. Born in [19]59 and starting in 2007. It was forty-seven or forty-eight years old or something like that. But the thing is it, they, it--I wanted to do as much as I could for, or wherever. And so not being of (laughs)--I decided to help another group called Rainbow Elders. That was a nonprofit group run by, uh, not another nonprofit, that they did stuff for seniors. I can't remember their name off of top of my head, but it-- we used to do things like go out on panels and teach medical facilities. We would teach nursing homes. We would teach assisted living centers. We were teaching people in, um, it just reaching out to all sorts of businesses and stuff and doing panels and educating them about the LBGT experience by telling our stories. Then, you know, I joined another group over at UMass Amherst and, I--that was the Stonewall Speakers Bureau. And they were very active within the GSAs [Gay Straight Alliance]. So, I used to go out to all the GSAs, whether it was a grammar school, middle school, junior high school, high school, and sometimes even other colleges, asking us to come out and speak to gender-related studies and/or education of the faculty. So, and then I started--because the group--that Pioneer Valley group and the Tri Ess group that I first started with--one of them was up in New Hampshire, even though I lived in Massachusetts and the other one was in the Southern part of Massachusetts. So, I was having a drive, you know, anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour, sometimes even two hours to go to a meeting. So, I decided to create my own peer support group, which I partnered with a hospital in Western Mass[achussets] in the county that I was in, Franklin County in Greenfield Mass. And they gave me a place to work with and a small budget. And I was able to start a group that actually still runs today, even though I'm here in California now. So, then because I also became part of what was known as the Massachusetts Transgendered Political Coalition, which in 2011, we ended up fighting for transgender Transcribed by Julia Friedman 4 2022-11-08 �LEEA PRONOVOST TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2022-04-08 rights. They made us actually take off on the bill by the time it--in order to get it out of committee, we had to take off transgender public accommodations rights. But it--bill did still encompass our rights to financial institutions, our rights for housing, our rights for, uh, financial housing and employment. Those were the three main rights that we were fighting for. Which it did end up getting passed in 2011 by the end of that year. Uh, they became-- (both talking at once) Friedman: (both talking at once)--Oh, congratulations. Pronovost: Yeah, thanks. But then again, in another organization that I became part of back in 2016, I helped to--we went back and lobbied or advocated for the state government to include transgender public accommodations, which would give us the--most people think, “Oh, that's the bathroom stuff and locker room stuff,” but there's so much more to it when you really sit down and think about it. The right to ride on a public transportation, the right to, (laughs), let's say I worked in a restaurant. If I punched out my time card to go out the back employee door and walk around to the front of that restaurant that hired me, they still have the right to refuse to serve me. Those are actually public accommodations. The right to be served in a hospital, you know? Many times throughout the years that I've worked, I've had myself and my friends have had discrimination by going to a hospital. I had one friend that they fell down on black ice and she got taken away on an ambulance and when they tore off or cut off her clothes, they found that she had a penis. And the doctor just looked at her and said--and then looked at the nurses and said, “Get that thing out of my hospital.” So, she--they called for another ambulance to take her to another hospital. Nowadays, because of that (unintelligible) she's permanently disabled, because she didn't receive the proper attention. And now, you know, we as taxpayers are paying to support her because of that discrimination. And so, things like that just didn't make any sense to me. So, you know, it made sense to go back and fight. So, we formed another organization called Freedom Massachusetts. And we fought for trans rights and we won them. But also, because of all that other activism, I had other organizations like PFLAG [organization dedicated to supporting the LGBTQ+ community; formally known as Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays] and, uh, PFLAG in two separate counties, both of them had asked me on to be on their board of directors. So, I ended up being on their board of directors at the same time about the--that same time I had many friends that I lost over the years in the support groups. And when I say I lost them, I mean that they took their own lives. And they're no longer here. And prior to my transition, I never knew anybody that committed suicide. Now, all of a sudden in the few short years that I was out as a trans person, I knew more than half a dozen. And I just felt that was wrong. So, I had heard about a organization called Trans Lifeline, and I actually became an operator for them. And because I, myself, (laughs), had, as I told you before, early in my life, I didn't know how to deal with this. I didn't know there were other people like me, there were a few times that I'd tried to commit suicide. So, and if I-- so if I could prevent one trans person from (laughs) stop—help-- stop them from committing suicide, then, you know, that would make me feel great. So, I spent a number of years as an operator, and then I actually became a team lead for a bunch of operators. Actually, even given peer support to the operators, because if you can imagine Trans Lifeline was an organization that was created by transgender people, for trans gender people. And the only criteria was that you had to be trans to be an operator. What helped was, though most of the operators were ones that had tried to commit suicide at one point or another. And sometimes when you're talking somebody down from a suicidal attempt, it brings you yourself into some pretty dark places. So, the operators would definitely need some, you know, self-care and guidance to get back to a point where they can do self-care even. And I know that I have many cases that led me into dark places that I didn't want to go, but yet, I went there to try and make sure, and it makes a difference. It really does, the peer thing, because I've never lost anyone when I was talking with them. When an individual Transcribed by Julia Friedman 5 2022-11-08 �LEEA PRONOVOST TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2022-04-08 that's on that brink or on that fence, or standing on that (laughs) that [precipice] to jump, if you will. Having somebody else talk to you, that's been there and been through what your experiencing, makes a huge difference. And they open up and listen. And then they also feel much easier to open up to you so that they can pour those feelings out and step off that [precipice]. So, that was really nice work for me. And then the next thing that I (laughs) became active in was the Transgender Law Center up in Oakland, California. I started volunteering for what they call the Detention Project. The Detention Project is basically--there's a lot of transgender people within our prison system that either wanted to transition or had already started their transition and they’re wondering, you know, “Here you have this trans woman sitting in a male jail, what are her rights?” Um, you know, and, “Can she have her name change? Can she get women's clothing? Can be isolated so she's protected away from the general population?” All of these things and Transgender Law Center addresses all of those issues. I was basically a research person for the lawyers and I would actually go and research each individual state's laws pertaining to the detention of transgender people, and then compose letters. And the lawyers would then approve or ask me, you know, change this, change that. And then we would issue the letters back to the inmates, so that they knew what their rights were and how to fund those rights. So, which meant a lot to me (laughs) the next step phase in my, uh, was actually working with the local because I was doing on the national level. And I started working with the local county jails and state prisons, and department of corrections. And I helped them to write--I helped both Massachusetts and Connecticut to write their policies on transgender people. And then--the same way with most of the county jail systems, I helped them to write--and I ran peer support groups within the county jails as well, so. Then I met a woman online (laughs) and moved out here to California (laughs). Well, it, it took a while. It took a few years, it-we had a Coast-to-Coast relationship, and we developed this great relationship. And we decided to take it to the next level and move in together. And I tried to get her to come out to Massachusetts, but one point she came out and it was minus--the high temperature was minus fifteen degrees. And this was the week between Christmas and New Year's. So, she was like, “No, no, no, no.” (both laugh) So, of course I've moved out here, and been living here ever since then. But before I even moved out, once we made that decision to move out here, I was like, “You know, I'm an--I'm an advocate and activist. What do you have out there that I can get involved with?” So, she introduced me to the North County--she was living in Oceanside at the time, and she introduced me to the North County LGBTQ Resource Center. So, I met Max Disposti, the Director and Founder of the place. And I was like, “What can I do to come?” (laughs) You know? “What can I do when I get out here?” (laughs) “Where can I go?” He's like, “Don't worry, we'll put you to work.” So, (both laugh) soon as I moved out here, they had an opening for the Unicorn Homes program, which being a case manager for that program, it was only fifteen hours a week. But, to start, and I was like, “Hey, it's along the lines,” because a lot of times running the peer support group in prisons, I was helping people do a lot of navigate social services that they would need getting out of jail. So, it wasn't too far of a fetch for me to be able to help people, you know, navigate applying for MediCal or, you know, Cal Fresh or being there just to listen and try to help homeless youth. And one of the things, even in Massachusetts, that one of my goals was eventually to create a transgender housing service. So, when I moved here and I had that opportunity to join something like this, I jumped on it. And Max liked what he saw in all the volunteer work that I did. So, he hired me for the position, even though there were a number of other candidates, I received the job. And I just started doing a whole bunch of free work for them (laughs). Because this is where my passion is. In the meantime, you know, I had been, you know, I still own property back East in Massachusetts, rental property. And, you know, I had a nice package of--so I wasn't worried about money or anything. So, why not work where my heart is? Nowadays though, I do a whole bunch of other things for The Center. I manage most of the grants for The Center. I also, now am, uh, Gender Advocacy Project Chair person for the Gender Advocacy Project, which puts on a number of events a year they do--we just recently had the Transgender Day of Visibility a couple weekends ago. Well, this weekend will be two weekends ago. Which was a wonderful event. Transcribed by Julia Friedman 6 2022-11-08 �LEEA PRONOVOST TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2022-04-08 We had, I don't know if I had to guess probably around 200, maybe 300 people come through and a bunch of booth with resources. And we had a great show. We had speakers and musicians and playing, and we had fun and games for the youth, and it was just a wonderful weekend. Wonderful day. But, so. Gender Advocacy Project also does Transgender Day of Remembrance. And, which is in November twentieth and a rather somber day for us because we're remembering those that we lost through transphobic violence. And the past few years have been actually kind of tough because the numbers have gone up astronomically in 2020, if I remember correctly, there was forty-one or forty-two, and in 2021, I believe there was fifty-six trans women. Now when I say these numbers, they seem like small numbers compared to a nationwide thing, but those are the ones that we actually know. Which, you know, a lot of times the gender is not known and, and they--or, and/or they misgender the person because the family doesn't want them to know about it. So, that number, even though the known cases keeps going up, I'm sure it's at least doubled if not tripled. So for-- for supposedly, according to the statistics, there's less than one percent of people are transgender throughout the nation. So, for that small amount of people to be targeted, the numbers of murders like that--violent murders--basically hate crimes, in my opinion, that's an astronomical amount. When you start looking at the statistics and the breakouts. Especially that most of those numbers, you know--I carry a certain amount of privilege because I'm a white transgender woman--or I appear to be white. I do have some American heritage, um, Indigenous blood in me. But that's something that people don't see because I appear to be white. So, therefore I've got a certain amount of privilege. I know that. When I look at a trans woman of color, those are the ones that are targeted when you look at those people that we honor year after year after year. It's usually Black or Brown people, and occasionally an Indigenous person in there. But, um, and sprinkled with a few Caucasian people. So, you know, it's so that when you look at that target population, that number, even it's more astronomical, when you break it down to what I call the “intersectionality of marginalizations.” So, you know, that's why that particular day is so important to me, even though it's a somber day. And I'm glad that we celebrate that and celebrate those lives that we lost. I'm hoping one day (laughs) and trying to do our best by fighting the hate. One of the grants that the North County LGBTQ Resource Center just got it is--we got a bunch of money into actually--and that's what the grant is called, “Fight the Hate.” (laughs) So, you know, it's an honor for me to be doing this work and nowadays I'm actually paid full time for what I do, because I do the grants. I do the Unicorn Homes. I'm also the Gender Advocacy Project Chair. I'm also--it, I never mentioned what I did prior to, well, while all that activation was going on, activism and advocacy work was going on, I actually worked a full-time job in telecommunications. I was a Level III Telecommunications Engineer. So, now I do all the IT work (laughs) at The Center as well. So, (both laugh), anything I can do for the community, you know, to make their life better. And, you know, I'm, uh, want to, you know, the North County LGBTQ Resource Center, I feel like I'm privileged to be able to work there, to be honest with you. And to be able to work in such a queer environment where I don't have to face what all my siblings face on a daily basis, you know? Because, despite all the work that we've done, there's still a lot of stigmatization, and even hatred of the trans community. It’s funny how, you know, one of the things, when you've learned the history, it was, you know, of the entire gay rights movement. One of--they say that turning point was Stonewall, right? Well, the first person to actually throw something at the police was actually a transgender woman. And the other trans girls started in. And then if you know, I know people that were actually there and they told me that basically the lesbians then started joining in. And it was at the encouragement of the lesbians that the gay men finally stood up and started doing something against the police. So, if you look at that in its context who, it--that key moment who was the first trans woman? But in gay rights movements, we were left behind. We were taken out because we were so controversial and they wouldn't be able to get their rights. That's what we were told as trans women or transgender people. If we were in clumped in with them, you know? So, even though we were there at the beginning and even well before that, you know, a lot of--there, there were riots all over the country, you Transcribed by Julia Friedman 7 2022-11-08 �LEEA PRONOVOST TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2022-04-08 know? If you look at San Francisco, if you look at Miami, there were riots in gay bars where trans women--and trans women were the target, because a lot of the women, because they couldn't get jobs were street workers. So, therefore they're trying to pick up these supposedly “men” that dress as “women,” which at the time was against the law, working as a sex worker. So, it's because of that attraction that the trans women stood up and then the lesbians stood up with them, and then the gay guys stood up with them. And yet, here they are fighting for their rights and telling us to step back. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: You know, it just didn't make sense. And believe it or not, there's still quite a few lesbian--for instance, I'm with another woman, I consider--I'm sexually attracted to other women. I'm romantically attracted to other women. Not so much with the guys. So, I consider myself basically a lesbian. There's a lot of lesbians out there that would tell me I'm not a lesbian because I'm a trans woman. These are what we would call TERFS: trans-exclusionary radical feminists. And they're out there all over the world, you know? One of the most famous and most recent news is J.K. Rowling. (laughs) Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: So, (laughs) despite all the love for, you know, the Harry Potter stories, I have to disagree with her principles. So, you know, so there's still--my point is despite all the fighting and activism and how far we've actually come, we still have a huge way to go. So Friedman: That actually leads me to my next question. Um, do you think creating an inclusive society is achievable? Pronovost: (both laugh) Honestly, I hope so. You know, one of the latest endeavors that I've looked into is--and I hope I'm not premature in saying this. I've been appointed, still yet to be confirmed--a Senior Commissioner for the City of--Senior Affairs Commissioner for the City of Vista. So, I'm doing my part to hopefully make that true. I don't think it'll happen in my lifetime. I am much older than (laughs) most people nowadays. I am a senior, hence why I'm on that (laughs) Senior Affairs Commission. Or want to be on it. So, and as of lately, there's more and more transgender people within the political scheme, trying to fight the battle from within, which will hopefully eventually bring that about. I mean, that's my ultimate goal. One of the reasons why I do stuff like this, this oral history presentation, or any of my activism--a lot of it is educational. I have a pet peeve that, you know, education brings in tolerance. Tolerance can achieve, hopefully, acceptance. And once acceptance is there, in a general population, then the next thing that that should beget is inclusion. And that's where me, that's my goal. (laughs) Since coming out and becoming an activist, that's--that's my life--that's my life goal, if you will. I know I probably will not see it in my lifetime within the next twenty or so years. I hope we still achieve, you know, steps moving in that direction as we go. One of the things that the Biden administration just recently did, was give, uh, make the announcement on Transgender Day of Visibility, which is March thirty-first. They made an announcement that they were going to allow an X marker on the passports for Transcribed by Julia Friedman 8 2022-11-08 �LEEA PRONOVOST TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2022-04-08 a third gender. They were going to make it much easier for a person like me who, you know, I was identified male at birth, but yet, I'm a woman, make it much easier for somebody like me to change that name and gender marker on the passport. Another thing that they were planning on doing was one of the really bad areas that--and a lot of us had been fighting against this, the TSA--when you go through TSA screening in an airport and you have the x-ray, um, it's happened to me, you know? I identify as a woman, all my IDs are women and they see something down below. And they call you out, “Hey, we've got an anomaly. You need to step aside over here and we need to get somebody to physically search you.” Friedman: That’s awful. Pronovost: So, they're going to do away with that genderized screening. Which is an awesome thing. Finally, thank God. Because it's so embarrassing, you know, when that happens. And it happens to so many people, it's ridiculous what we have to endure and by being identified that way. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: So, that, that was a step in the right direction. They’re looking at making the Affordable Care Act more inclusive for gender treatment, especially one of the things that we recently did as the Gender Advocacy Project, which is the program of the North County LGBTQ Resource Center. I--one of my volunteers put together a list of all the state bills. For instance--what I mean by that is, last year in 2021, we had one hundred and ninety-one hate bills. Most of them were targeting transgender people. And in particular transgendered youth and their ability to receive transgender healthcare. Me, working on Trans Lifeline, know that most of those phone calls that I used to get in on Trans Lifeline are trans youth, anticipating and wanting to commit suicide. If they were accepted and were allowed to get their hormones, though, those numbers would drop drastically. And we have the statistics to back that up. But here, these states are wanting to outlaw and actually go even--go after doctors. And look at Texas. Texas wants to, you know, go after the parents saying that gender-affirmation healthcare for their child is actually child abuse, you know? So, one of the things the Biden administration said was they were going to fight, that they were going to make the Affordable Care Act to protect so that doctors don't have to report that to state agencies. Because they, you know, the state agencies, the state Texas--state of Texas, was forcing the doctors to violate people's HIPAA rights. I mean, they have no right to that information, but yet the state's forcing the doctors to turn that over. HIPAA's a national law, It's not a state law (laughs). They shouldn't be able to bypass federal laws. So, the Biden administration, uh, pledge to make it more difficult for states to be able to do stuff like that. You look at the “Don't Say Gay Bill” in Florida [SB 1834: Parental Rights in Education], you know? Ohio just came out with a bill last week--or just earlier this week, I forget which--that basically mimics the exact wording of Florida's bill. And no one, the state of Ohio and who they are and their history, that will pass, you know? So, we're going to have a couple of states that, you know, people are not allowed to say “You're gay.” There's another state in Utah. Utah wrote a bill that's very similar to Texas's bill about transgender healthcare, but it actually even encompasses adults. So, they want to make it illegal to be me (laughs), you know? And force--trying to force us to go back into the closet, so to speak. Because like I said, you know, one of the thing, one of their arguments is, “Oh, it's become a ‘popular thing.’” It's not popular. You just never knew what the real numbers were because we were all hiding away in the closet. Transcribed by Julia Friedman 9 2022-11-08 �LEEA PRONOVOST TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2022-04-08 Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: So, you know. These are thing-- that's why I say we still have so far to go. This particular year though, in the first three months of this year, we have two hundred and thirty-eight hate bills. So, we even-- last year was a record year with all the hate bills, but in three months’ time, we have surpassed all of the bills from last year. So, they're--the thing that I'm looking at is I'm hoping this is like the last grasp (laughs) of them. (both laugh), you know? Their desperation before they fall down into the cracking crevice and go wherever. Friedman: I hope. Pronovost: (laughs) Go away. Yeah. Well, that's my hope (laughs). Because, you know, if you look at the statistics throughout the entire United States as a nation, over sixty percent of the nation is for transgendered people and having our rights or rights in particular of LGBT people. So, that's more than half the population. So eventually I know we will get there because that acceptance number and because, you know, I see the trends: tolerance, acceptance, then inclusion. I know we'll get there, but we still have so far to go. So, um, yeah. I hope that--I hope that answers your question (laughs). Friedman: Oh, absolutely. Kind of going back to politics, Like throughout your time, working on the East Coast and the West Coast, have you kind of noticed a difference in the politics working on both Coasts? Or, has it just kind of depended, um, kind of like the political shifts because you kind of were mostly on the on the East Coast? Um, is it kind of-- does it not really matter because you kind of just, you mostly on the East Coast for most of your life and--? Pronovost: Um, be honest with you, knowing, I don't think it's that much of a difference here, you know. Here at times, I think there's certain pockets you, that if you will, that are actually inclusive. When I look at the city of Oceanside, for instance, you know? I had mayor Esther Sanchez come out to Transgender Day of Visibility and she gave a speech about being visible and standing up for what's right, you know? And, so I see Oceanside as a pocket, but yet, when I look at a city like Vista where I actually live, you know? Vista is, you know, for lack of better terminology, very conservative. But then there's even worse conservative areas. Like, you start pushing up into Menifee or something like that, you know? You're looking at very, um, I don't like to use this because I don't like to use somebody's name, but it very much what most of us within the community would consider to be Trumpers or people that propagate hate. And I hate using that because I don't like to talk about individuals or refer to that. But that term, let's take it away from the person because that term existed, uh, “Trumping somebody” is overcoming is somebody. So that's what I mean by that terminology, more or less. Where they are totally conservative. And actually, even don't like people like me. You know, I've had people up there in that city actually reach out to me saying they're having troubles with their school systems. Now here in California, for a transgender person and they should--a student should be able to change their name on all information except for their transcripts. That's the only thing that they can't change because that's a legal document, Transcribed by Julia Friedman 10 2022-11-08 �LEEA PRONOVOST TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2022-04-08 but they should be able to walk in without the school notifying the parents that, “Hey, I no longer want to be called Jane. I want to be called Max.” And the school legally is obligated to change their paperwork. Friedman: I see. Pronovost: But yet that's not happening in a city like that. I get phone calls quite often saying that the school is fighting the individual or the school has actually outed the individual to the parents, even. Because some of these schools aren't, you know, minors are even protected from this, the school is not supposed to out the youth. But yet here we have it happening, you know? And you know, it--so the hate and the stigmatization and the indignities and the discrimination still happens. No matter where you are and back East, I happen to live in a pocket--that Pioneer Valley group that I belong to. That's the whole Connecticut River Valley area throughout all of Western Mass. And that was very progressive. I mean, we--there's a town called Northampton there, which it is kind of, uh, was the gay city for the East Coast kind of equivalent to what San Francisco is to here. So, it's mainly a college town, but that made the entire whole (laughs), excuse me, for lack of better terminology, Pioneer Valley seemed very, uh, “granola-ish,” if you will. Originally Pioneer Valley, that whole Connecticut River Valley, those were the first communes back in the sixties. They started there and then moved out here to the West Coast. So, (laughs), very similar, you know, because even in Massachusetts, you still had your pockets of hate and bigotry and, so. It's very similar. The fight's the same, no matter where (laughs) I seem to go. But, you know, the goal is to get more cities, you know, to be like Oceanside, you know? Because Oceanside they've raise, you know, they do raise a pride flag. Here in Vista, the pride flag that (laughs) that rainbow flag's never been raised here in the City of Vista. And so, you know, I'm hoping that maybe sitting on one of the commissions, (laughs) I can change that (laughs) from within. And so, you know. Friedman: Well, I just have one more question. Pronovost: Okay. Friedman: Um, so you, you've already talked about it. You have a wonderful year--a wonderful career in activism. What have you learned throughout your twelve years working in the trans and LGBT field of activism? Pronovost: Oh, (laughs), I've learned so much it's hard to pinpoint any one thing. I think the one that weighs the heaviest on my heart, if you will, is probably--you know, one of the things that early on people did mention about the intersectionality of marginalizations and now that I've had, you know, more than ten years at this, I actually get to see it. And that breaks my heart. How, you know, for instance, you know, I worked as a Telecom Engineer and I was the Senior Telecom Engineer for one of the world's largest telecommunications companies, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph [Nippon Telegraph and Telephone]. The first time I walked into an engineering meeting as me, as Leea, they looked at me like, you know, I-- “Where where's the donuts and coffee?” (laughs). That was the type of look I got. Transcribed by Julia Friedman 11 2022-11-08 �LEEA PRONOVOST TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2022-04-08 And, “Who the hell are you to be sitting here in this engineering meeting?” When, you know, before I used to lead the engineering meeting, you know? So, I know the difference between being a man in a man's field and being a woman trying to make it in a man's field. And, and so I don't—[connection froze]—People that I serve doing what I do and I look at, you know, a trans woman of color, and I see how much more discrimination that they actually face. Because of that intersectionality. Now you start adding more intersectionalities on top of that, such as being disabled or mentally disabled, you know? Disadvantaged. That--those numbers not only do--I mean, they grow exponentially and that's what weighs really heavy on my heart. And now I see that so much more easily, and makes me want to fight all that much or for them, you know? But also at the same time, you know, being--working at the North County LGBTQ Resource Center, and seeing other people fight for, you know, my rights as a trans woman, I want to say, you know, not for me, without me, you know? So that's one of--that ties well into the intersectionality thing. So, you know, I know I can't go out there. I can mention about it, but I can't go out there and say, “You know, we need more protections for trans women of color.” I can say that, but, you know, I don't experience that because I do have that privilege. I can talk from that privilege that we need to do something about it, you know? So, but I want those, I want to be able to empower those trans women of color to come forward and speak up for themselves. I want to, you know, empower other people to do what I do so that the fight you, I know I'm not going to achieve my goal in my lifetime so that I know the legacy I leave behind is me helping them empower themselves so that they can even empower other people and move it forward. So, that's the main thing I've learned is that we have to give people the power to have that voice. So, it isn't just about any one person, it's about empowering an entire demographic, if you will. Friedman: Well, thank you. Is there anything else I should have asked or anything else that you would like to share today? Pronovost: Well, geez, we've covered so much. (both laugh). I don't know. I don't think so. I think we pretty much covered it. It's a lot to chew and digest, if you will. So, I think, I think we've done a good job. Friedman: Yeah. Pronovost: So. Friedman: Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today, Leea. We are so happy to have you a part of this project. Pronovost: Yeah, my pleasure is so, um. I'm just happy to be here. Like I said, that that's my pet peeve. If I can do something to--I'm hoping this gets seen by as many people as it possibly can be. And it gives them the self-confidence in seeing somebody like me to empower themselves to find their voice. So. Transcribed by Julia Friedman 12 2022-11-08 �LEEA PRONOVOST TRANSCRIPT, INTERVIEW 2022-04-08 Friedman: Absolutely. Just continuing on with your, uh, with what you've been doing from the start, basically ever since you started in 2007, 2008. Yeah. Pronovost: Yeah. Friedman: Yeah. Well, thank you again. Pronovost: You're very welcome. And it's my pleasure and thank you for having me. Friedman: Well, it's our pleasure (both laugh). Transcribed by Julia Friedman 13 2022-11-08 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Transcripts Description An account of the resource Written oral histories and transcripts are available for researchers that prefer the written word, or to see the whole interview in a document. Transcripts of <a href="https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/collections/show/5">audio and video files</a> are also available as part of those video files. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Pronovost, Leea. Interview transcript. April 8, 2022. Description An account of the resource Leea Pronovost was a transgender activist and has advocated for transgender and LGBTQIA+ rights since coming out after a near-death experience in 2006. Pronovost began her work in activism in Massachusetts and partnered with a variety of organizations where she worked to help the queer community in areas such as LGBTQ+ education, housing, and hospital rights. She also worked for the Transgender Law Center and the Trans Lifeline. Most recently residing in Vista, CA, Pronovost was a staff member at the North Country LGBTQ+ Resource Center, where she worked as a case manager for Unicorn Homes, chaired the Gender Advocacy Project, and was a grant writer. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Leea Pronovost Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Julia Friedman Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2022-04-08 Subject The topic of the resource LGBTQ+ issues LGBTQ+ rights Transgender people -- Civil rights Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant San Diego (Calif.) Springfield (Mass.) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Special Collections Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en</a> Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Leea Pronovost License A legal document giving official permission to do something with the resource. Property rights reside with the university. Copyrights are retained by the creators of the records and their heirs. This resource is licensed for noncommercial educational use using CC NC-BY 4.0. Please contact Special Collections at archives@csusm.edu if you have questions regarding usage of this oral history. Please see the related “Preferred Citation note” for language on citing materials from this collection. Permission to examine Library materials is not authorization to publish or to reproduce the examined material in whole, or in part. Persons wishing to quote, publish, perform, reproduce, or otherwise make use of an item in the Library’s collections must assume all responsibility for identifying and satisfying any claimants of the copyright holder. The researcher assumes full responsibility for use of the material and agrees to hold harmless the University Library, and California State University, against all claims, demands, costs, and expenses incurred by copyright infringement or any other legal or regulatory cause of action arising from the use of the Library's materials. In assuming full responsibility for use of the material, the researcher also understands that the materials they examine may contain Social Security numbers, other personal identifiers, and/or sensitive material on potentially living and identifiable individuals (e.g., medical, evaluative, or personally invasive information). The researcher agrees not to record, reproduce, or disclose any Social Security number or other information of a highly personal nature that may be found. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SC027-18 Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2022-11-08 Activists and activism Community history History Department internship LGBTQIA+ experience Women's experience Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral Histories Description An account of the resource Video and audio oral histories can be viewed here. Histories are listed alphabetically by last name. Individual histories are indexed and transcribed and can be searched. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <p>Rights to oral histories vary depending on the history. The library owns the copyright to some histories, and has license to reproduce for nonprofit purposes for others. Please contact CSUSM University Library Special Collections at <a href="mailto:%20archives@csusm.edu">archives@csusm.edu</a> with any questions about use.</p> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Jennifer Fabbi Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Joel Rafael OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=RafaelJoel_FabbiJennifer_2025_10_21.xml Interview Keyword This filed adds keywords to the Omeka Oral History item type. Keywords are included in the OHMS XML, this field in Omeka will allow for full data migration between OHMS XML and the Omeka Record. This field does not impact the OHMS / Omeka integration and is optional if you do not need to map the "keywords" field in the OHMS XML to the corresponding Omeka record. Woody Guthrie OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 6.0 Rafael Joel. Interview, October 21, 2025. SC027-088 00:00:00 SC027 California State University San Marcos University Library oral history collection CSUSM csusm Woody Guthrie Joan Baez Joel Rafael Band Woody Guthrie Folk Festival Okemah, Oklahoma Laura Nelson Joel Rafael Jennifer Fabbi moving image RafaelJoel_FabbiJennifer_2025_10_21.mp4 0 https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/files/original/b2892396c100240bc8d1a92ba1e46a1c.mp4 Other video English 0 Introduction 0 108 Highlights of the Joel Rafael Band Rafael highlights two activities of the Joel Rafael Band including performing as the opening act for Joan Baez' tour of the southwest United States. Joan Baez ; Joel Rafael Band ; John Steinbeck ; The Grapes of Wrath ; Skirball Cultural Center ; Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key ; Salinas, California ; Los Angeles, California ; Woody Guthrie ; Jamaica Rafael ; Carl Johnson ; Hopper ; Austin, Texas ; Doc Martens 0 926 Dissolution of the Joel Rafael Band Rafael discusses the breakup of the Joel Rafael Band and reflects on the definition of success. Joel Rafael Band ; songwriters ; success 0 1125 Developing knowledge of Woody Guthrie Rafael speaks about his growing knowledge of Woody Guthrie's life and music and the various sources he used to gain that knowledge. Woody Guthrie ; Pete Seeger ; This Land Is Your Land ; Billy Bragg ; American communist movement ; Merchant Marines ; Bob Dylan ; Songs to Grow On ; Santa Monica, California ; Alan Lomax ; Will Geer ; Library of Congress recordings ; Nora Guthrie ; Dance a Little Longer 0 2270 The Woody Guthrie Folk Festival Rafael discusses the beginnings of the Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival in Okemah, OK, and how he became involved with it. Rafael played the Festival twenty-seven times. Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival ; Bound for Glory ; Okemah, Oklahoma ; Huntington's Disease ; Woody Guthrie: A Life ; Joe Klein 0 2914 The lynching of Laura Nelson Rafael tells the story of the lynching of Laura Nelson and her son in Okemah, OK. Woody Guthrie's song, Don't Kill My Baby and My Son, is based on this story. Joel searched for several years for the location of the lynching and finally found it. Laura Nelson ; lynching ; bridge ; Woody Guthrie ; Pretty Boy Floyd ; 1913 Massacre ; Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People ; Don't Kill My Baby and My Son ; Ku Klux Klan ; Tulsa Race Riot A Report ; Boley, Oklahoma ; sharecroppers 0 4495 Woody Guthrie review show Rafael discusses his role in the Woody Guthrie review show, The Ribbon Highway, Endless Skyway. Jimmy LaFave ; New York City ; The Ribbon Highway, Endless Skyway ; narrator 0 Oral history Joel Rafael is an American singer-songwriter and folk musician from San Diego County, California. Joel has been making music with his band and solo for over fifty years. He is well known for his writing and performance in the style of Woody Guthrie. In this part three interview, Rafael discusses the activities and dissolution of the Joel Rafael Band and his twenty-seven years performing at the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. NOTE TRANSCRIPTION BEGIN 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:21.984 Hello, this is Jennifer Fabbi, and today I'm interviewing Joel Rafael for the California State University San Marcos University Library Oral History Program. Today is October 21, 2025. This interview is taking place at Joel Rafael's studio at his home in Escondido, California. Joel, thank you for interviewing with me today. 00:00:21.984 --> 00:00:23.824 Of course. Thank you. 00:00:23.824 --> 00:00:38.274 So, at our last interview, we left off with the Joel Rafael Band. So could you tell me a little bit more about the band, what you were working on, and what happened with the dissolution of the band? 00:00:38.274 --> 00:14:19.763 Well, I just say that it's pretty difficult, I think, to keep any band or musical group together for an extended period of time unless there are things that happen that inspire people to want to keep going 'cause it's a lot of work. And so, I would say the duration of the Joel Rafael Band was just under ten years that we worked together, and we had some really interesting tours. We played a lot of festivals. Eventually--probably around turn of the century going into the first few years of the two thousands--people in the band, other members of the band besides myself started to develop some other interests and started to work towards some personal projects. And it just made it more difficult ultimately to keep the continuity of a group 'cause people were just off on their own, on their own projects. But there's a couple things that we did that I'd like to highlight before we sort of end the chapter on the Joel Rafael Band. And one of those things was in about 2002, somebody, the guy who was the director, and I can't remember his name right now, we can probably research that 'cause he's not the director anymore. But he was, at the time, the director of the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California. And they were approaching the centennial year of John Steinbeck's birth. And so they were doing some special events and programs. And one of the things they were gonna' be doing is presenting The Grapes of Wrath, the Frank Galati adaptation for theater, of The Grapes of Wrath, as a radio play in Los Angeles at the Skirball Theater (Skirball Cultural Center), which is right next to the Getty Museum. And they have a beautiful theater there. And they asked me if I would--he had heard some of the Woody Guthrie tunes that I had recorded, even though my album, first album of Woody Guthrie Tunes wasn't out yet. He'd heard one of the songs, which was the Billy Bragg-Woody Guthrie co-write, Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key on, I think it's on Hopper is where he heard the song, which came out around 2000. And they really liked it and liked my approach to the Guthrie music. And they asked me if I would write original music for the centennial performance of The Grapes of Wrath at the Skirball by the L.A. Theater Works. And so, got together with the cast, which starred Shirley Knight, the late Shirley Knight. She was an amazing, amazing person. Just a sidebar, after she had passed away, I found out that another big influence on my art and my creativity, a guy named John Cooper--a painter that I met when I was living in Washington--he's probably like fourteen years older than me. And he's passed away now, too. But I was telling him about The Grapes of Wrath program. I was gonna' send him a copy of it. And I mentioned that Shirley Knight had starred it. And he told me that, Oh, she was my girlfriend when we were in college. So I thought that was kind of a good side note. But anyway, she was a wonderful person, wonderful to work with. And what we did is we did seven radio play performances of the play at the Skirball Theater. And they recorded the audio for all seven performances along with the music that we played throughout the performance. And then they took those seven performances and edited that into one performance that was then released with, in a program called The Theater's the Thing (the Play's the Thing), which is a syndicated radio program that the L.A. Theater Works puts on. They do a number of plays throughout the year, and then they present these radio plays that then air it on like PBS stations. That kind of thing. And so, we were really proud to do the music for that. That was basically myself, my daughter, Jamaica Rafael, and Carl Johnson, my guitar player. So it was the three of us that did those shows. And then the other really cool thing that we did with the Joel Rafael Band, right towards the end, was we had put out our first recording of all Woody Guthrie songs called Woodeye. And it's kind of an interesting story, so I'm gonna' go ahead and tell it. I had finished the album, and we'd had it pressed. It wasn't distributed. We just had like a thousand copies of this album, Woodeye, and Joan Baez was playing in San Diego at Humphreys. And so, we got a couple tickets to go to the show, my wife and I, and we went to the show, and I took a copy of Woodeye along just on the chance that I might be able to see Joan and give her a copy of my Woody Guthrie record. That didn't happen. But while we were sitting in the audience--and we were, had really good seats, we were like a third or fourth row--I was sitting next to a little girl. She was probably ten years old, maybe nine or ten years old, and her father was next to her. And somehow, I don't know how, we got onto the conversation, but I asked her at a certain point if she knew who Woody Guthrie was. And she did because she and her dad were Joan Baez fans. They had come down from Los Angeles to see Joan play. And so, when she made it clear that she knew who Woody Guthrie was, she's only nine years old, I thought, well, I'm just gonna' give her the CD. So I gave her the CD, and her and her dad listened to it on their way home. So the next day, I got a call from this guy, the father, his name's Larry Shapiro, and he called me up--got my number somehow 'cause I don't think it was on the record, but somehow, maybe my, my website was on the record, somehow he got my number. Maybe he wrote me an email. It's a long time ago now. So, he contacted me the next day and said that they'd listened to the recording on the way home, and that they loved the recording, and he wanted to know if it was distributed, and I told him no, it wasn't distributed, that we were self-distributed. So we were basically putting it in places on consignment, that kind of thing. And he said, Well, my best friend is the president of ADA record distribution, which is like ADA global (Worldwide). It's the biggest distributor, you know. And so, he said that he had a small label, and he would--it was like a boutique label called Nine Yards Records. And he said, We'd like to put your record out. So I put him in contact with my manager, and initially, before Inside Recordings put out my double set of Woody albums, Larry Shapiro and Nine Yards Records put out the initial release of Woodeye, the first album. And as part of that--I don't know how he did it--but somehow he arranged for us to be the opening act for Joan Baez, who was going out on a southwest tour of the U.S. So she was gonna' be playing like California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. And so, we ended up getting that opening act, and we had--our first show was at UCLA, and then from there we went to, I think it was like Scottsdale (Phoenix), and played the Celebrity Theater with Joan Baez. And then from there we went to New Mexico, and we played in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. And then we went from there to Austin and played Austin, Texas. So we rented a van, like a conversion van with a camper in it. And the four of us set off on tour, kind of tagging with Joan Baez. They were in their bus. And so, they had a bus driver and everything, and we were self-driven. But anyways, we followed them along on the tour. And that was probably about the biggest performances that the Joel Rafael Band did during the time that we were together as a group, was with Joan Baez. And a couple little anecdotes about Joan, 'cause I just think they're kind of fun and interesting because she's just a really interesting--kind of an enigma--but a very interesting person. First off, they always ask you when you go on tour what you'd like to have on your rider, which means when you get to the show, it's like, any kind of food or any kind of comfort you might want to have there. The promoter will ask you to submit a rider, which we did. But as an opening act, we never got anything that was on our rider. It's like we would get to the shows, to the venues, and there wouldn't be anything for us except the dressing room, you know? So right off the bat, Joan's management and Joan basically told us, Look, we have a really good rider. And when we get to the theater, there's always--not the meal, but a snack. Like, there'll usually be a tureen of soup, china dishes, cloth napkins, and silverware (laughter), and some snacks to eat before soundcheck. And they just wanted to let us know that we were completely welcome to their area when we got to the theater, knowing that anything on our rider was never gonna' be fulfilled (laughter). So they were very generous. She was very generous in that respect. I had a pair of shoes that I was wearing for that tour. They were Doc Martens, but they weren't the regular black Doc Martens, they were kind of like these special custom Doc Martens. They were like wingtips, and they were two colors. They were like red and green, sort of candy apple red and then sort of this Kelly green with a what do you call it? I'm trying to think what the name of those shoes are. Wingtip. So they had the wingtip designs on them, and Joan noticed them right away (laughter). And she said, I really like your shoes. She said, I'm really into shoes, and where did you get those? And I said, Oh, they're Doc Martens. And she said, I really like those. Well, then the next day I passed her backstage at the next theater, and she said, I love those shoes. I wear size seven- and-a-half (laughter). I don't know if I told you this story yet or not. Anyways, I made a note of it. Okay. Oh, cool. She wears size seven-and-a-half. Okay. And then the other thing about her is that every night, every show that we played--and I think we did five shows with her--when we were sound checking, she would show up at the monitor board over on the side of the stage. All of a sudden, we noticed Joan was standing there by the monitor guy listening to us play our songs. Well, I backtrack. She'd be in the theater for our sound checks, like the theater's empty, and all of a sudden, one person comes walking in the theater, and it's Joan Baez. And she sits down in the theater and listens to us play our songs during our sound check and then claps (laughter)--one person in the theater. So she made a made a point of letting us know how welcome we were and that she liked us, you know? Then when we would actually do our show, our opening act, our first and second song. We would look over, and Joan would be standing with the monitor guy at the monitor board listening to our first two songs. And then right after the first two songs, she would leave to go get ready for her show. But every night she came out and listened to our first two songs and would stand there and applaud for us from the side of the stage. So she was just really, really a treasure to work with, such an icon and an early influence of mine. So in a way, I've been fortunate, not just with Joan Baez, but I've been fortunate enough to meet some of my biggest influences and share the stage with some of my musical heroes. So when we got back from the tour, I went and I found a pair of those shoes for Joan Baez and I sent them to her-- 00:14:19.763 --> 00:14:20.458 Nice, nice. 00:14:20.458 --> 00:14:43.865 So that's my Joan Baez story. And then the other thing we did was the Steinbeck thing. Those are two really great things we did with the Joel Rafael Band. And that kind of ended our run was--right around 2003 were probably the very last shows that we played together. 00:14:43.865 --> 00:14:49.007 So, let me ask, your daughter, Jamaica, was part of the Joel Rafael Band-- 00:14:49.007 --> 00:14:51.065 She was-- 00:14:51.065 --> 00:14:56.000 --how was that to work with your daughter and for her to work with you during that time? 00:14:56.000 --> 00:18:27.000 Honestly, it was really rewarding, but really difficult. I don't think you can ever transcend the relationships--like you're the parent and she's the child. I mean, even though she's an adult--I'm not sure why that is. But we had a really good run as a band because she was a great player. Actually, everybody in my band--in that band--was, the three people playing with me were just all extremely excellent musicians, natural players that just had a sense about how to dress up a song. They're all songwriters. And that's probably part of the reason that eventually everybody went their own ways because they wanted to express their own art. They don't wanna' just be backing me up all the time. And I understand that even though it was a tough breakup, because we worked really hard at being successful, which, it's an elusive term. And success, I think, in general, can be elusive because it's hard to define. What is success? Is it financial? Is it notoriety or visibility? Or is it just the satisfaction with doing something--being able to pull off doing something that you want to do and that you love to do? And in my case, I'd say, all three of those came into play at one time or another. I think when you're younger, you have these visions of where you want to go with something that's artistic, like a band, or as a painter or an artist. Success is sort of synonymous with visibility or fame, but they're really, completely have nothing to do with each other. Success, I don't think should ever be measured by monetary success. That's just one aspect of what you could call success especially in the art world. So it was about a ten-year run, and we played a lot of great music. My daughter--we still play music together. We had a long break because of some complications in her life. But we still play music together, and we still have all the same issues we had when we were both younger due to our relationship with each other. But the music is great. And I think that it's a real reward to be able to be involved with any endeavor with your children if it could happen. Sometimes I think relationships make that more difficult. So I guess that's how I'd characterize it, is just to say that you can't really transcend relationships, but you can make really good art together. 00:18:27.000 --> 00:18:45.000 Thank you. So, moving to the kind of next topic is can you tell me more about your deep connection to Woody Guthrie and especially the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival that you've played at for twenty-seven years? 00:18:45.000 --> 00:24:44.000 Well, I knew quite a bit about Woody Guthrie before the Festival started. I might have covered this a little bit earlier, but one thing I've always said is that when I first started to play the guitar, a number of songs that came along or that I came across to play happened to have been written by a guy named Woody Guthrie. You know, you don't forget that name (laughter). It's just Woody Guthrie. It just sounds almost like a caricature or a cartoon character out of the past. People that are younger than me, like the people in my band, for instance, that were younger than me, when they thought about Woody Guthrie, they pictured him as some person out of distant history. But Woody Guthrie only lived to be fifty-five years old, and he died in 1967, which was the year I graduated from high school. So he was relevant and active during my lifetime, and when I was a kid. I think some of the younger folks that think of him as being a sort of a historical figure, part of that is because Pete Seeger made sure that every kid in the country learned This Land Is Your Land when they went to school (laughter). He went around to schools and did programs, and he made sure that everybody knew that song. And I can go up to almost anybody and ask them if they know who Woody Guthrie is. And usually they don't. But if I say, This Land Is Your Land, then they know that song. And then I can tell them, Well, Woody Guthrie wrote that song. But then what I always like to add to that is something that's the description that Billy Bragg uses. Billy Bragg from England, he's a musician from there. His description of Woody Guthrie is Woody's the guy who wrote This Land is Your Land. In the United States, he's the guy who wrote this Land is Your Land. In the rest of the world, he's the guy with a sign on his guitar that says, This machine kills fascists. And that's how the rest of the world knows Woody. He did two--what do you call it? Two deployments with the Merchant Marines, because when World War II started and the Allies joined--or I should say the U.S. joined the Allies to fight the fascist Nazis in Europe? At that time, there was an American Communist movement in the States that a lot of people were supportive of. It wasn't the communism of Russia or Stalin, but it was the communism in pure philosophy, or which is basically a communal sharing of resources in a country. It never turns out that way, as it turns out, in other countries. At least it hasn't. There was a movement at that time in the late thirties going into the early forties. It was an American communist movement, and a lot of the people in the folk movement and a lot of artists were involved with that movement because they saw it as maybe an antidote to the harsher sides or harsher parts of capitalism. So when the war started and America joined the Allies, a lot of these artists saw the writing on the wall that it wasn't gonna' play out to be supportive of communism anymore in America. But they didn't wanna' fight. They were basically pacifists in philosophy. And so, some of them became conscientious objectors. Others joined other areas of the service where they didn't have to fight but could be supportive of the U.S. and Allied efforts. And so, Woody joined the Merchant Marines, along with Cisco Houston and some other friends of his. And they were involved with helping transport troops and munitions to Europe. Woody Guthrie famously wrote the song, The Good Ship Reuben James (The Sinking of the Reuben James). And actually there's a story, an anecdotal story, about being on a ship transporting troops and weapons to Europe that was being hit by depth charges. And so the whole crew was down in the hull hiding out. And the crew--not the crew--but the troops were down in the hull hiding out. And the crew, of course, was still manning the ship. And at a certain point, Woody said--grabbed his guitar and his harmonica and started to head down into the hull. And his friend Cisco Houston said, Where are you going? And he said, I'm going down to play some songs for the troops. And they said they didn't wanna' go down there. That's the worst place to be when you're being hit with depth charges is in the hull of a ship. And so, the three of them (Woody, Cisco, and Jimmy Longhi) went down there and sang songs until the tragedy was over and calmed the troops down. And that was just kind of the way Woody was, you know? 00:24:44.000 --> 00:37:50.000 So I knew a few Woody Guthrie songs when I first started out. And then as I became a young adult, I became aware of the fact that Woody had been a big influence on, well, actually a lot of people, but Bob Dylan in particular. And I was pretty hugely into Bob Dylan at the time. And so, I decided to kind of go back a little further and see what was it about Woody that attracted Bob, you know? And so, I started to look for Woody Guthrie materials, and this was probably about 1973, 74, into the mid-seventies. And there wasn't much there to find. If you were lucky, you could find a copy of Bound for Glory at a used bookstore. But Woody's recordings were pretty much out of print. There were a couple things I did find. I found a collection of cowboy songs sung by Woody Guthrie, along with Cisco Houston singing harmonies. A real treasure. And then I also found Songs to Grow On, which was the songs that Woody and his wife, Marjorie, wrote for their kids. And they were unique as children's songs because--we had children's records 'cause I had young kids. But a lot of the children's music that we encountered, a lot of it was just kinda' silly, you know? And occasionally you'd find some songs that did, could really impart some educational values and some meaning within the lyrics to the kids that were young. And the thing that I loved about Woody Guthrie's children's songs were that they were about real stuff. About real things. About being angry, about playing with your toys, about washing your face and brushing your teeth, just sort of the practical life stuff was really covered in Woody Guthrie's children's songs. And so, we got copies of those on cassettes at a store we found up in Santa Monica that carried a lot of this kind of alternative stuff. And my kids grew up on those songs, listening to those songs in our car and singing along with those songs. So we sort of got educated about Woody's material together. Turns out that Woody wrote like over 3000 songs and only recorded about 80 tracks. So there's a lot of uncovered material there. A couple times I tried to put together programs about Woody Guthrie with the songs that I'd learned off the Cisco Houston album. I came across the Library of Congress tapes that were recorded by Alan Lomax. He was the son of John Lomax. And they were both musical, I guess you'd say they were ethnomusicologists. But they uncovered a lot of music from the deep South, sung by Black people, slave songs, field songs. And these were basically unknown artists that they would find, and they would go to where these artists lived and make field recordings of their songs and their music so they could provide a historical reference for some of this music that had influenced so much other music that maybe we had heard of. But we hadn't heard of the stuff that had influenced this music. And so the Lomaxes were real musical historians. I think that Woody was probably introduced to the Lomaxes by Will Geer, the actor. And I don't know if you know who Will Geer was. Okay, well, not by name, but if you've ever seen the show, the Waltons, Will Geer was the grandpa on the Waltons. Okay. And he was one of Woody Guthrie's best friends. You didn't see Will Geer in a lot of movies or a lot of shows until The Waltons because he was blacklisted during the McCarthy Era, during the McCarthy hearings. So his career was pretty much put on hold. And he was a Broadway actor. He was the star of the Broadway show, Tobacco Road. And I guess probably it was in the thirties or forties. And when Woody got to New York, that's one of the people he met was Will Geer. And Will Geer, as far as I can tell from what I've read, introduced Woody to many, if not almost all of the I important people that Woody met, like the Seegers, the Lomaxes. I'm not sure who all, but I mean, when Woody got to New York, he was just like this folk singer from Oklahoma. And he kind of got taken under wing by Pete Seeger and Will Geer and put on some programs where people realized the folk movement was pretty vital at that time in the forties. But a lot of it were performers that had learned songs of the people that had kind of created this music. And when Woody got to New York he was perceived and seen as an authentic. He had actually lived in Oklahoma and through the Dust Bowl and traveled across the country with the Dust Bowl migration and sang the songs of the people. And so, he was like, wow. When he got to New York, people were just like, Wow, this guy's really special. And so, he recorded a number of songs with Moe (Moses) Asch, who had a recording studio and was recording folk musicians in New York. And then he recorded the Library of Congress interviews with Alan Lomax. And I think that the, it might be like two or three hours of interviews, just Woody and a guitar, with Alan Lomax asking him questions about growing up in Oklahoma and about the Dust Bowl migration, the country life that he led, his traveling across the country and different people he met. And that's all preserved in the Library of Congress. Those are just wonderful recordings. If you ever get a chance to hear those. They're just called the Library of Congress Recordings by Woody Guthrie and Alan Lomax. So when I found those recordings, I learned a lot about Woody Guthrie and him telling his own story, and at one point, I decided, well, I could, I know a lot of these songs, and I'm learning some other ones from these Library of Congress recordings and then Woody talking about his life and songs. I was a pretty good, I was a quick study for copying musicians, emulating music I had heard. And I think that most artists go through that process. They emulate what they love, and eventually what they're emulating, the distillation of all of the things they're emulating becomes another more unique original thing that becomes your own. I've always told artists that have asked me--I've used the "fake it 'til you make it" method. You know, you start copying things you like because you decide you want to do this. And if you've got an knack for it, you can keep going. And then what happens? It's almost like a learning to skate, like learning to ice skate, you know, you're really wobbly and you're falling down all the time, but then all of a sudden one day you're just doing it, you know, wow, I'm skating, you know? Well, with the musical influences, it's sort of like that. That's kind of the analogy I make for that, because all of a sudden, you're doing it on your own. You don't sound like somebody else anymore. But you're still using all those resources that you've learned, but it's been distilled into your own unique voice. I think that that's at least one road to becoming an artist. And when people ask me, that's what I always tell 'em. For me, it was the "fake it 'til you make it" method. So at one point, I had these songs and I was listening to these interviews, and I thought, well, I could put together a program and take it around to my kids' elementary school or middle school and do an educational program about the Dust Bowl, about Woody Guthrie and about the folk music of that era. And so, I decided to work on some of that. And I started to put together some ideas and make a list of songs and figure out which of the interview pieces I was gonna' try to learn so that I could do this program, and I wanted endorsement for it. And I knew that Harold Leventhal was Woody Guthrie's manager, was looking after his estate. Woody had died in '67, this was probably like in the seventies, mid-seventies to late seventies. So I found a number for Harold Leventhal in New York City. He was listed, and I called him up and he answered the phone. And I expressed my idea about how I wanted to do this Woody Guthrie program. He heard me out, and then he said, You cannot do this. You cannot even play any Woody Guthrie songs publicly because we are in the process of doing a Woody Guthrie program right now called Woody Guthrie's American Song--it was a play they had put together. I guess probably in the seventies, late seventies. And he said all of those songs and all of those interviews and recordings are all spoken for and protected, and you can't use any of it, so just forget it (laughter). And I thought like, wow, man, that wasn't very nice. I got off the phone with him, and he pretty much gave me a nope (laughter). And so, I let that idea kinda' slide, and I kind of thought, well, Harold Leventhal, he's kind of an edgy guy. So many years later after I started playing on the Woody Guthrie Festival, and I'll backtrack onto that a little bit, but I was given the first Woody Guthrie lyric by Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter. A song called, Dance a Little Longer. And we put it to music, and it was on the first collection of Woody Guthrie songs. And when Harold Leventhal heard it, it turns out he loved it. Now he didn't connect that I was the same person that had called him twenty years earlier to ask permission to do this program. And it had been turned down. And so, turned out I was on my way home from the Woody Guthrie Festival the year that I had finished that first album. And all of a sudden, my cell phone rang, and I answered it, and it was Harold Leventhal, and he'd gotten my number. He called my manager and gotten my number, and he called me just to tell me how thrilled he was with the song Dance a Little Longer, and that he was thanking me for keeping Woody's legacy alive. And I just always thought it was really ironic. He never knew that I was the person who had called him that he had so harshly turned down twenty years earlier. And here now he was calling me and thanking me for writing music to a set of Woody Guthrie lyrics. So it was kind of cathartic. And kind of full circle in a way. 00:37:50.000 --> 00:48:34.014 But anyways, the Woody Guthrie Festival started in 1998. And I had a lot of background in Woody at that point. I had learned a lot of Woody Guthrie songs on my own. I had found my used copy of Bound for Glory and read it. And right around that time, there were a couple other books that came out that were biographical, biographies of Woody. They call Bound for Glory an autobiography, but it's really not. It's autobiographical, for sure. But he took a lot of license, and as I understand it, the original text of that book was like maybe 700 pages and just completely outta' chronology. And it took a really good editor, and I should find out the names, so I can tell you the name of the woman that did the editing for Bound for Glory, but she was able to take all of Woody's writings at that time and organize them and edit them into a novel that is autobiographical that Woody wrote. It's probably, well, it was on the bestseller list for a time. And I think it probably was an influence of writers like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, some of those beat writers were probably influenced by Woody's writing because Kerouac's book, On the Road is not dissimilar from Bound for Glory in its cadence. And it's just the way the story's told, traveling around the country, hitchhiking, riding freight trains, and stuff. So I guess it was probably the end of 1997, maybe early 1998, I got a postcard from another artist, whose mailing list I was on--a guy named Ray Wylie Hubbard, Oklahoma, Texas guy. And he had actually written one hit song. He's a really great songwriter, but the one hit song that made it was called, Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother (laughter). I don't know if you remember that title (laughter), but it was not what he usually wrote, but that's the song that made it. Anyways, so I had met Ray Wylie Hubbard, and I was on his mailing list, and I got this postcard listing his shows and listed in July, he was gonna' be playing the first annual Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma, Woody's hometown. And I knew the history--that town, Woody Guthrie's hometown, had mixed feelings about Woody. Historically, half the town had hated Woody because of his, what they perceived as his political views. They thought he was a communist. They thought he was a leftist. And Okemah, Oklahoma, if you look on a map, is pretty much dead center in the middle of the United States, and it's about 70 miles east of Oklahoma City--a very small town. I think it's still population about three or four thousand. And they had decided to do this festival. They had tried to do things for Woody previously in the town, but it never panned out. You know, something had always gone wrong or just never happened. But in the nineties, there was actually a woman and her husband that we met, became really good friends with once the festival got going, Sharon and Dee Jones. That were residents of Okemah, Oklahoma. And Sharon Jones had a cousin from San Francisco, and they got together in Oklahoma, probably in, I don't know, late nineties for a family reunion. And the liberal cousin from San Francisco said to Sharon, You live in Okemah, Oklahoma, and this town doesn't do anything for Woody Guthrie. That's shameful. You know, just kinda' shamed her about it (laughter). And so, she decided, we need to do something for Woody Guthrie. And so, turns out Woody's little sister lived right nearby in a town called Seminole. And so, Sharon had met her before 'cause Mary Jo Edgmon Guthrie, Woody's little sister, had spent a lot of her adult life going around to school classrooms to tell the kids about her brother, Woody Guthrie, who wrote, This Land Is Your Land. You know, sort of like Pete Seeger had done, but in her way. Telling her story about her big brother. And so, they knew of her. And so, they (phone interruption). Sorry about that. Just gotta' get rid of this call. So they knew about her, and so they contacted her and presented the idea of doing a Woody Guthrie Festival. And she said, Well, Woody's son, my nephew, is gonna' be coming through town in a couple months. I'm not sure exactly whether it was a couple months or sooner. Let's get together and tell him about your idea and see what he thinks. So they got together, and this is the story Sharon and Dee told me, so it's secondhand, but this is as I heard it. They got together with Mary Jo and Arlo Guthrie and Sharon and Dee and had a dinner and presented this idea of this Woody Guthrie festival. And Arlo said, Well, this town has never been that appreciative of my dad. So I don't know how successful something like this would be, but what I would suggest is that if we do it, we make it free. So we could pay artist expenses to get there, but I think it would be best if no artist was paid to play on the festival except for expenses to get there. And if no one had to pay to go see the festival. So we could call it the Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival. So for the first several years, that was the name of the festival, and it was free. They charged for parking, like $5 a car. So they were able to raise some money that way. And then on Wednesday night, the day before the festival started, the night before the festival started, they had a show in the Crystal Theatre in the town, which is an old theater that was there when Woody was a kid. And he used to go to the movies there. And his mom used to go to the movies there with Mary Jo when she was a baby. In fact, there's a story that one time, because she had Huntington's Disease, which is the disease that Woody died of, when she was showing signs of that, she would just go to the theater and just sit in the theater for hours and watch the movies. And one time she was in the theater, and Mary Jo, who was about three years old, wandered out of the theater into the middle of the street. And somebody picked her up saying, who's got a kid on the loose? So that's when they knew that Nora (Belle) Guthrie, Woody's mom and Mary Jo's mom, was in the throes of Huntington's disease. So they established this festival, and it was 1998. And I heard about it on this postcard that I got from Ray Wylie Hubbard. And I thought, man, it's gonna' be just in like a month or two. It wasn't too far away. And so, I know how these things are booked, and you have to book your shows a good six months in advance, sometimes even a year in advance, to get on some of these venues. And I really thought, man, I should be on this festival 'cause I've been looking for Woody Guthrie for a number of years now and kind of putting that into my performance portfolio and learning his songs and taking ideas from the songs and incorporating them into my own writing. And so, I called my manager and told (her) about this festival and said I'd really like to try to get on this maybe next year, and realizing I probably couldn't get on it in 1998. And so she said, you know what? I just got a letter from the people putting on the festival asking for a quote from one of our other artists, a more famous artist that they managed. And she said, So I can get the quote for them and then send the quote to them and send some of your material and pitch you for the festival. So she did that. And I was just so fortunate to get on that festival, even though it was only a couple months away. So I was one of the opening acts for that festival. I went there by myself the first year. I had just read Joe Klein's book, Woody Guthrie: A Life, by Joe Klein. And it's a voluminous book about Woody Guthrie's life. It doesn't pull any punches. And I just read that book. And there were some things that happened in that book that you don't hear about, just hadn't heard about it. They weren't in Bound for Glory or any other things I'd heard about Woody Guthrie. 00:48:34.014 --> 01:11:06.385 One of the things that I had read about in that book was a lynching that had happened in the town of Okemah, Oklahoma, of a woman named Laura Nelson. And also of her son, her teenage son. Her and her son were lynched from a bridge about six miles outside of town in 1911. Her husband had been accused of stealing a sheep from a white farmer. And so, the sheriff and a deputy went out to arrest the husband, Lawrence Nelson, I believe was his name. And there was a standoff. And during the standoff, their son, who I think was about 14, had grabbed a shotgun and was hiding under the stairs of the house and shot the sheriff and hit him in the leg. And he bled to death in the yard begging for water, which the family wouldn't bring him. And so then the deputies left, they formed a posse and came back out and arrested the whole family. And took them to Okemah, placed the husband in the jail, and then right across the alley from the jail in another building that also had barred windows, they held Laura Nelson and her son and her baby. She had an infant. So the husband in one cell, and then Laura Nelson, the son, and the baby in another building right across the alley waiting for the circuit judge to come through so they could have a trial for the murder of the sheriff and for the lost or the stolen sheep. That didn't happen because before the circuit judge came, a mob was formed, and they broke into the building that had Lauren Nelson and her son and the baby, and they took them about six miles out of town to a bridge and lynched them from that bridge. There's a photograph of that. 'Cause these photographs of lynchings at that time were popular in the South, and they were sold as postcards in in like drugstores. It'd be like these postcards of these various lynchings that had happened. And so, this is one of the photographs from that series of photos is the picture of Laura Nelson hanging and then her son hanging next to her. The baby was left on the shore to die. And anecdotally it's told that that a family adopted the baby. And there's different stories. Some say it was a Black family that picked the baby up. Others say it was a white family that took the baby in, and then later she was actually a privileged Black that could, that had privileges in town that other Blacks didn't have. (Phone buzzes) Lets turn this off. I'm getting a lot of spam calls for some reason today. So I had read this in this Joe Klein book, and I had been invited to come play the festival, which was like a month or two off. And I thought, well, I'm gonna' have to bring a Woody Guthrie song or some Woody Guthrie songs with me. I mean, it just seemed like that's what you had to do. If you're gonna' be on the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. And I knew a lot of Woody Guthrie songs, but a lot of them were the popular songs, like This Land Is Your Land. This Train (This Train is Bound for Glory), I Ain't Got No Home (I Ain't Got No Home in This World Anymore), 1913 Massacre--maybe not one of the most well-known ones. But I had learned a couple of songs in the early seventies from Jack Elliot, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, from some of his recordings and then seeing him play live when I was about 20, 24 years old. I was on a trip to Colorado and saw Jack Elliot live and got to meet him and John Prine. And John Prine was just starting out. He wasn't famous yet (laughter). So I'd learned these couple of songs from Jack Elliott. I'd learned Pretty Boy Floyd, and I'd learned 1913 Massacre, which--two of Woody's most powerful songs. But I knew that someone would probably be doing those songs, you know? Because there's a lot of people already on the festival. I didn't know most of 'em. I knew a handful of them from other festivals I'd been on and maybe we'd been on shows together, that kind of thing. And so, I had a book called Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-hit People, and it was a compilation book of songs that had been compiled by Alan Lomax and his father, John Lomax, folk music historians. And then the musical notes, or the musical melody line had been transposed from the recordings by Pete Seeger. So he had actually done the musical notation. And then every song in the book--and there's probably a couple hundred songs in the book--but every song in the book had an introduction, just telling about the song, where it came from and what was important about it. And those were all written by Woody Guthrie. Now he only had maybe four songs in the book that he had written, but he did the notes for all the songs. So I was looking for the songs that he'd specifically written, and I found them, there were like four or five songs, and a couple of 'em were songs that were the popular songs that people knew. But there was this one song in there called Don't Kill My Baby and My Son. And it was about the lynching of Laura Nelson just outside the town of Okemah, Oklahoma, which is Woody's hometown. The lynching happened in 1911. Woody was born in 1912. He didn't write the song until about 1940. So it happened before he was born, a year before he was born. He must have heard talk about it, like for his whole childhood. It was a very traumatic event. I mean, even for the people that did it. It wasn't like a party. It was a very horrible, noteworthy event that had happened in that town in 1911. Wasn't soon forgotten. So I know he heard about it. And there were probably other lynchings because when I actually looked for the location there, one person who I had asked about it that was from there, said, Oh, you mean the bridge where they hung the Blacks? Plural. So I think there was more than one lynching there, but the one that was documented was the lynching of Laura Nelson. So I found this song, Don't Kill My Baby and My Son, in the book. And it was notated and had the words. And so, I set about learning it, and I wasn't thinking, you're going to Oklahoma to the town where this happened. Yeah, it was a hundred years earlier almost. But it was still a very intense thing that had been. Most of the people that lived in that town didn't know about it. It had been buried by the time it was like 1998. But I just naively took this song. This is a song that nobody's gonna' do (laughter). Yeah. That's for sure. So I got there, and I told a couple people about it, that this was the song I was gonna' play, the Woody song I brought. Who was it I told--was it Ray Wylie Hubbard? I'm gonna' have to think on that for a second, because I've messed that story up a couple times and got it with the wrong person. But I told somebody, one of the artists at the show, and it will probably come to me here, but I told one of the artists at the show about the song and played it for him. And he said, You're gonna play that here? (Laughter). And he was from that area. And I said, Well, yeah, I was thinking about it. He said, Okay. He said, I'll have the car running out back just in case you have to leave really quick (laughter). So it did shock people. I sang the song, and it shocked people. I wasn't thinking anything of it. I mean, this is how blindly I did this (laughter). I guess if I'd actually taken some time to think about it, I might never have taken that song there. But in retrospect, I'm really glad I did. Because it opened up a conversation that wasn't being had there about this lynching and other lynchings. And the first reactions were from some of the townspeople, like, why would you come and sing a song like that? They thought it was my song. They didn't know it was Woody's song. And I started that year to look around for where it happened 'cause there was a description in the book I'd read that said it was six miles southeast out of town, or I can't remember exactly what the directions were, but there's like four roads, four directions going out of town. So I headed out on one of the roads about six miles, and we looked here and there and everywhere, and we never did find it. And then the next year I looked again, 'cause I was invited back and have been subsequently invited back every year. So for the next few years, I looked for that location of that hanging and got sent by two or three different people to different places. Oh, yeah, I know where that is. Yeah, you just gotta' go out here and turn right, and there's a dirt road and then you follow that dirt road until it hits the river, and then you go down the river a little ways. And it was like this kind of stuff, you know? And also in the description, it had said that it was a railroad bridge that the lynching had occurred from. And of course, we had the picture of the bridge and in that picture, there's not only the picture of the hanging, but on the bridge, the entire bridge, is people standing on the bridge watching, looking down, watching the hanging. And it said that Woody's father was there. That might've been, he might've been in the lynch mob, and he might've been in the Ku Klux Klan. Now there's no documentation that he was. It's believed he probably was. But you know, some people just say, yeah, Woody's father was in the Ku Klux Klan. I never say that because I don't know that that was true. It might've been true. But I never stated it. And my reason for that was because Mary Jo Guthrie, Woody's baby sister, became a really good friend of mine for over twenty years. And I don't think that she believed that her father was in the Ku Klux Klan. And I just didn't see any reason to keep throwing that at her or throwing that out there when it would be in her presence. It just didn't seem necessary to me since there wasn't any proof. Might have been was good enough for me. And it was good enough for her, too. So I always left it there, but there's still people that say, yeah, he was definitely in the Ku Klux Klan, and he may well have been in the mob that took her out there. So anyways, I sang the song and was a pretty intense reaction. And then the next year, I sang the song again, and it kind of became signature to me, and people became aware that it was something that had happened in their town. The second year I got a note that somebody brought backstage to me from a guy that had a booth out in the festival area, in the audience area. He had a book booth, like a used bookstore. And it said, Come out and visit my bookstore booth. I've got something for you. And so I went out there after I played, I walked out there to where his booth was, and he said, I've got something for you. And he gave me a copy of the 1920 race--it was called the 1920 Tulsa Race Riot Report (Tulsa Race Riot A Report). So, you know, it was a massacre, not a race riot, but that's what they called it in this report, which was the official report that had been made to try to understand why the massacre had happened in Tulsa. And in the context of that, they talked about the history of lynchings in that region of the country, Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, kind of that area. And further in the deep South, as well. And so, that was an eye-opener (laughter) to get that book. So now it was kind of like the whole thing was kind of outed, you know? And then over the next few years, different people would tell me where the location was, and we would go and look for it and we never could find it. And then, I'm gonna' say, what year was that? I don't know exactly what year it was. It was probably like 2015, 2016, somewhere in there. We were at the festival, and my sister-in-law, my wife's sister, who lives in Hawaii and is a anthropology archeology professor with a specialty in, I guess you call it like the South Pacific Islands. But she's just really interested in that, the whole study of that kind of stuff. And she knew we were at the Woody Guthrie Festival. She knew the stories about this lynching and the song I had sung there. I've told all these same stories to her. And she had had a foot injury and was off her feet, couldn't go anywhere. And so she was vicariously following us at the festival, and started to look at some aerial photography of the area. She knew that the lynching had happened six miles out of town. And she started looking on all these, going around on the map, looking at photographs of--I guess on Google Earth or something. And the first thing she told us was, she said, I look at the picture of that lynching, and that's not a railroad bridge. She says that that that bridge would never hold a train. That's what they call a cart bridge because in the time when that bridge was built, they didn't have cars. Everybody traveled by horse cart. But that means that when that bridge was destroyed. It was probably replaced by another bridge on a road, on an existing road. It's not like just a bridge that came from somewhere and went across the river to somewhere else. It was most likely a bridge on a road, because it was a cart bridge, which meant it was a road, and a continuation over the river of a road. And she said, I think it's this location--was six miles out town going I think west outta' town. I get my directions kind of messed up 'cause I'm not there right now. But anyways, there's the one main road that you could take outta' town. It's like the one road up from Broadway, which is the main drag in Okemah, is highway, I think it's 62. And you take that out of town six miles, and you come to a town about four miles out. You come to a town called Boley, which was the first all-Black town in the United States. It was established by a guy named Boley, who owned the railroads. And after the slaves were freed, after the emancipation of the slaves, he was a guy who was of the opinion that that black people could govern themselves. He was a segregationist. So he felt that Blacks and whites should be segregated but that Blacks could have their own towns, kind of crazy idea. But the white town could be over here and Black town could be over here. So they established this area of land that he owned as Boley, and it could be the first Black town. And then they put the word out that freed slaves could come there and establish a life there. And the history of that is pretty brutal 'cause people would come there, like the first year, it's like a couple dozen folks came there and almost all of them were wiped out by the end of the winter either by disease or by wolves. 'Cause there weren't really any dwellings. I mean, they were basically just living in makeshift shelters. Eventually they established the town. The next year more people would come, bunch more people would get wiped out in the wintertime. And progressively, they established a town there, and it's still there. So you drive past this Black town, which is the area where Laura Nelson and her husband's farm was, they were probably sharecroppers, so probably wasn't their farm. And then eventually you come to this bridge over the Canadian River, and we had been to that bridge, and we'd looked, like you stand on the bridge and look up the river. And it looked a lot like the postcard, very similar landscape to the postcard of that lynching. But we couldn't establish that that's where it was. And we couldn't see anything, any evidence of it. And we were looking at this one direction that looked like the background of the picture. If you looked the other way, it didn't really look the same. So we were looking, I think we were looking to the south. Let's see, we were coming this way. Yeah. We were looking to the south. And, our sister-in-law, my sister-in-law, contacted us and said, I think you're looking the wrong way over that bridge. You should go back out to that bridge and look to the north side and look straight down at the bottom of the bridge. She says, I think I see two big footings on each side of the river from an older bridge along, that comes off of a dirt road. It's like just a farm road now. And then the highway with the new bridge. So we went back out and we look, and sure enough, here's these two concrete pilings, what's left of them with a little bit of rebar sticking out of 'em on each side of the river. So we go down to explore, we go down to the river under the bridge, and there's just all kinds of graffiti there. You know, like this is where it happened. Look up Laura Nelson. And then a whole bunch of obscene racist things written on the bridge wall down there. So you--and beer cans everywhere. And you could just tell this has been a off zone party spot for a long time, and this is where it happened. But the old bridge is gone. And that's the reason that the landscape looked the same is because if you had backed up down past where the old bridge was and looked the same direction, there you have that picture. So we did find the location. 01:11:06.385 --> 01:14:55.000 And as you said, I played that Festival, I played it 27 times, which has been a great honor. In the 25th year, they gave me an award, a Woody Guthrie Legacy Artist award, which was a real honor. There were about five of us that had been on the Festival for over twenty years. I think I might have been maybe the only one that had been there for the whole twenty-five. You know, a couple others had been there for twenty-four years. Or one guy had been there for twenty-four years and had been in a helicopter accident before the Festival one of the years. But he showed up anyways, even though he couldn't play, it was on crutches. So they credited him with that Festival as well. So since I started playing that Festival, I've met several Woody Guthrie scholars. I've read at least two other biographies of Woody Guthrie that have come out. They're very comprehensive. One by Ed Cray and the one by Joe Klein. And then there's several other smaller books. There's a couple children's books that tell his story. There's so much material now. Like when I started to look for Woody Guthrie, there was hardly anything. And now there's just a ton of material. In fact, they just released some recordings that Woody did at home, on a home recorder, when he couldn't really travel around that much anymore because he was starting to have the symptoms of Huntington's disease. So Woody Guthrie's been close to my heart. And a couple years after the initial song that I wrote that was a co-write, I was given four more sets of lyrics that did not have music. And so, I have two Woody Guthrie albums with Woody Guthrie songs, and the first one has the one original lyric and then the second one has four more. And then there's a, some other Woody Guthrie songs on there. Some of them are familiar, but there's some other ones on there that were never recorded by Woody but did have musical notation. And I found those because a few years into the Festival, one of the guys that came to the Festival on a regular basis in the early days, his name was Jim Pollard. And he was the president of the Huntington's Disease association in Lowell, Massachusetts. But when the Festival started, he started coming down to Oklahoma every year to do a panel on Huntington's disease. And we pulled in some people from the local chapter in Oklahoma City. And then Mary Jo Guthrie was on that panel with us because she never got Huntington's disease, and we don't know, it supposedly skips. It's every other generation. It's genetic. And they've discovered a lot about Huntington's disease just in the last few years. I know that they've been able to isolate the gene that causes it. And so, they can test people when they're young to see if they have that gene that means that they may be likely to get it. And there are some even gene-altering procedures now that are experimental. They think that eventually they'll be able to cure Huntington's disease. 01:14:55.000 --> 01:23:31.154 I'm trying to think what else can I cover about Woody Guthrie In my experience with the Woody Guthrie Festival. About half of the way into it, one of the other performers, Jimmy LaFave, who died a few years ago, he and I were two of the first people on the Festival, played it every year. And at a certain point, I think it was probably around 2003 or '04, he put together a review show that was his band and himself, and then about four other songwriters. And those would be like a couple of the songwriters were regulars, song regulars on the show. And then the other two or three songwriters would be people that lived in the areas where we were doing the show. So if we were in the northeast or on the west coast or wherever it would, we would fill in those other two or three songwriter spots with people from that area that had an affinity with the Woody Guthrie Festival or with Woody Guthrie in general. And we had a narrator and we would do these readings of Woody's essays and work from Bound for Glory and other things he'd written. And then that would be followed by a song, a Woody Guthrie song by one of the artists on the show backed up by Jimmy's band, and it was called The Ribbon Highway, Endless Skyway, A Tribute to the Songs and Words of Woody Guthrie. And we did that I guess for about three years, all over the country, at venues all over the country. And I was the--at a certain point, the guy who was our narrator who was from Oklahoma City died. And so, I became the narrator. And we had a show in--before he passed away--we had a show in New York City on Governor's Island, which is, you take the ferry out to Governor's Island. And it was like an eleven o'clock, I think. Eleven o'clock show in the morning. And we all flew in to New York City from various places--from Chicago, Oklahoma, California--whoever was in our cast--just coming from Texas, we're kind of flying all these different places to New York City, and it was a lot of weather issues going on. And so, there were a lot of delays and some plane cancellations. My plane was supposed to get into New York City at like nine o'clock at night and then I would take a taxi to downtown to the hotel we were staying at. And then the next morning at like nine o'clock, I was gonna' meet everybody, take a taxi to Battery Park and meet everybody there at the ferry dock. And then we'd all get on the ferry to Governor's Island. And then they had a stage set up for us there as a big outside venue and whole bunch of people. And we'd do the Ribbon Highway show there. So my plane got delayed. We got to New York City, and they didn't have a place for us to land. So we circled and circled and circled, until finally they said we're getting low on gas and they still don't have a place for us to land, so we're gonna' go to Buffalo, and we're gonna' land in Buffalo until they can clear up all these backed up planes and everything in New York City, and then we'll take you back to New York City. So we get to Buffalo, which is like this little nothing airport up in Buffalo, New York. And we got out of the plane, and we were there for probably three hours waiting. Three, three or four hours. There were no concessions or anything to nothing. You couldn't get anything to eat or anything sitting on terminal waiting. Finally, they said, Okay, we're ready to take you back to New York City. So we got back on the plane, they fly us down to New York City, we land, they deboard us, and by the time we get to the baggage area, it's about three in the morning. And my call is at nine at Battery Park. And so (laughter), we get into the luggage area, and the baggage is just piled up against the walls everywhere. I mean, it's just like stacks of bags everywhere. My bags are just coming in, so I was able to get my bags pretty quickly, but these are all from backed up flights. So I go out to get a taxi, and the taxi queue is literally two-and-a-half or three blocks long. I mean, I can see the end of the line, but it's gonna' be a long time before I get a taxi. And by the time I get my bags and I'm out there, it's a quarter of four. And I'm just going like, oh, man. So I'm in line, way in the back of the line and all of a sudden, this guy comes walking by, Jamaican guy, and he's going, anybody going to Midtown? I give you a ride to Midtown. He says, I got a van. I'll give you a ride to Midtown. Nobody says anything, and it's totally against the law. He's not supposed to be there, scabbing rides. And so I go, I'm going downtown. He goes, not going downtown, going Midtown. So he keeps talking, going to Midtown, going down the line. Standing there going, well, I wish he was going downtown, you know, but he's not. So I'm still standing in line. Pretty soon he comes back, he says, you going downtown? I go, yeah. He says, I'll take you downtown. Says, okay. I grabbed my bags, man. I'm not afraid to go with him. (Laughter.) I jump in his van, and he's this Jamaican guy with a Jamaican accent. And we get talking about--this is kind of a funny anecdote--we're talking about pot. We're talking about marijuana, just like, about how he has a brother that grows marijuana in Jamaica, and we're kind of trading these counterculture marijuana stories. And I said, yeah, you know, the trouble is when you're a musician, if you want to find something to smoke, it's really hard. You know, you go to these different places, and you're a stranger in a strange land, and so you can't find anything. And he says, Just remember this, man, wherever you go, it's already there. And (laughter) that turns out to be true. So I just thought that was just really a funny thing that he said. So I've always remembered that. Anyways, he gives me a ride to my hotel in downtown. I get there. I check in. I've got--it's a nice little room, but you know, by now it's like five in the morning. And I've got four hours to get to sleep and then wake up and meet these people to get a taxi to Battery Park to meet the crew. And so we, I get in the thing and turns out this guy, Bob Childers, who was the narrator, his plane got to Chicago from Oklahoma City, but then his flight was canceled going to New York City. So he's stuck in Chicago, so he's not gonna' get there for the show. And I don't know this yet, but I get to the Battery Park and our producer, who kind of coordinates our whole show and everything, she sees me as I get there, and she comes up to me with the script in her hand, and she just hands me the script, and she says, You could do this, right? (Laughter.) And I look at it and I go, what? And she goes, Bob's not gonna' be here. You know, you need to do the narration, you can do it right? And I go, yeah, I can do it. And then, so I did the narration for that show, and then our next show--I guess Bob made one more show, but he was very fragile. And he died about a month after that. And so I became the narrator of the show for the next, I guess we did it for more than three years. We probably did it for about five or six years. And we ended that show up. And that's about, that's probably about all my information on Woody. 01:23:31.154 --> 01:23:39.094 Thank you so much, Joel, for this third installment of your oral history. And you know, we'll be back together soon at some point. 01:23:39.094 --> 01:23:41.414 Yeah. I've got more stories to tell on this. 01:23:41.414 --> 01:23:42.207 Yes, you do. 01:23:42.207 --> 01:23:43.265 Thank you so much. 01:23:43.265 --> 01:23:45.265 All Right. Thank you. NOTE TRANSCRIPTION END ]]> https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en video This resource is licensed for noncommercial educational use using CC NC-BY 4.0. Please contact Special Collections at archives csusm.edu if you need reproductions made.&#13 ; &#13 ; Please see the related “Preferred Citation note” for language on citing materials from this collection.&#13 ; &#13 ; Permission to examine Library materials is not authorization to publish or to reproduce the examined material in whole, or in part. Persons wishing to quote, publish, perform, reproduce, or otherwise make use of an item in the library’s collections must assume all responsibility for identifying and satisfying any claimants of the copyright holder.&#13 ; &#13 ; The researcher assumes full responsibility for use of the material and agrees to hold harmless the University Library, and California State University, against all claims, demands, costs, and expenses incurred by copyright infringement or any other legal or regulatory cause of action arising from the use of the library's materials.&#13 ; &#13 ; In assuming full responsibility for use of the material, the researcher also understands that the materials they examine may contain Social Security numbers, other personal identifiers, and/or sensitive material on potentially living and identifiable individuals (e.g., medical, evaluative, or personally invasive&#13 ; information). The researcher agrees not to record, reproduce, or disclose any Social Security number or other information of a highly personal nature that may be found. 0 https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=RafaelJoel_FabbiJennifer_2025_10_21.xml RafaelJoel_FabbiJennifer_2025_10_21.xml https://archivesearch.csusm.edu/repositories/3/resources/19 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rafael Joel. Interview, October 21, 2025. Description An account of the resource Joel Rafael is an American singer-songwriter and folk musician from San Diego County, California. Joel has been making music with his band and solo for over fifty years. He is well known for his writing and performance in the style of Woody Guthrie. In this part three interview, Rafael discusses the activities and dissolution of the Joel Rafael Band and his twenty-seven years performing at the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SC027-088 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025-10-21 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Joel Rafael Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Fabbi Subject The topic of the resource Songwriters -- United States Folk music Guthrie, Woody, 1912-1967 Folk music — United States — The Joel Rafael Band Folk music festivals—United States Music festivals—Oklahoma Woody Guthrie Folk Festival Baez, Joan, 1941– Communism—United States United States Merchant Marine Lynching—United States Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Salinas (Calif.) Los Angeles (Calif.) Austin (Tex.) Santa Monica (Calif.) Okemah (Okla.) Boley (Okla.) New York (N.Y.) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en." target="_blank" rel="noopener">In copyright</a> Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Joel Rafael Art and artists Community history Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral Histories Description An account of the resource Video and audio oral histories can be viewed here. Histories are listed alphabetically by last name. Individual histories are indexed and transcribed and can be searched. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <p>Rights to oral histories vary depending on the history. The library owns the copyright to some histories, and has license to reproduce for nonprofit purposes for others. Please contact CSUSM University Library Special Collections at <a href="mailto:%20archives@csusm.edu">archives@csusm.edu</a> with any questions about use.</p> Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Jennifer Fabbi Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Joel Rafael OHMS Object This field contains the OHMS Hyperlink (link to the XML file within the OHMS Viewer) https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=RafaelJoel_FabbiJennifer_2025-08-20.xml Interview Keyword This filed adds keywords to the Omeka Oral History item type. Keywords are included in the OHMS XML, this field in Omeka will allow for full data migration between OHMS XML and the Omeka Record. This field does not impact the OHMS / Omeka integration and is optional if you do not need to map the "keywords" field in the OHMS XML to the corresponding Omeka record. Folk music;songwriter;counterculture;Woody Guthrie OHMS Object Text This field contains the OHMS Index and / or Transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable in Omeka 6.0 Rafael, Joel. Interview August 20th, 2025. SC027-086 02:06:00 SC027 California State University San Marcos University Library oral history collection CSUSM csusm Folk music ; songwriter ; counterculture ; Woody Guthrie Joel Rafael Jennifer Fabbi moving image RafaelJoel_FabbiJennifer_2025-08-20.mp4 0 https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/files/original/1f874004b7ad7b916e612b2588ed3fb1.mp4 Other video English 0 Introduction 0 56 Early childhood and musical beginnings Rafael talks about how he become involved with playing music through public school music programs. He started as a drummer and began playing in a cover band at an early age. music education ; drummer ; Everly Brothers ; The Beatles 0 397 Adolescence and folk music influence Rafael discusses how folk music began to become popular in 1960 and how it began to influence his musical tastes. He acquires his first guitar, learns to play and performs in hootanannies. Kingston Trio ; guitar ; solo artist ; Hawaii ; Joan Baez ; Bob Dylan ; hootananny ; Woodie Guthrie 0 1421 Influence of political assassinations and discrimination on development of political leanings Rafael reflects on turbulent times during high school including several political assassinations and how they affected him. His Jewish family experienced discrimination through redlining. political assassination ; Martin Luther King, Jr. ; Malcom X ; John Fitzgerald Kennedy ; Robert F. Kennedy ; Covina ; West Covina ; Jewish ; redlining ; John Birch Society 0 2236 The Vietnam War The Vietnam War begins, and Rafael discusses having to register for the draft. He attended college for one year and re-connects with his future wife, Lauren, at this time. draft ; anti-war ; college ; California State University Fullerton ; conscientious objector 0 3098 Move to Oregon Rafael talks about moving to Oregon, joining the counterculture movement, and getting arrested for drugs after an undercover operation. counterculture movement ; Oregon ; drugs ; arrest 0 4886 Move to Escondido and birth of first child After the loss of Rafael's father, he and he wife move to Escondido to help tend his family's avocado orchard. Soon after, their first child, Jamaica, was born. Escondido ; avocado orchard ; first child ; Jamaica ; natural childbirth ; grove service 0 5483 Making headway with music career Rafael discusses the development of his music career in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Songwriters Showcase is a key highlight of this development. During this time he forms a duo with Rosie Flores. Los Angeles Songwriters Showcase ; Colin Young Band ; Goldmine ; Rosie Flores 0 6807 Opening act for Rick Danko and subsequent connections and successes Having moved back to North San Diego County, Joel recounts his big break in opening for Rick Danko and the subsequent pattern of becoming an opening act for many successful bands. Rick Danko ; promoter 0 7180 Becoming knowledgeable about Woody Guthrie Rafael begins to research Woody Guthrie and the people he had influenced. He learned a number of Woody Guthrie songs. Woody Guthrie ; Bob Dylan ; Harold Leventhal 0 Oral history Joel Rafael is an American singer-songwriter and folk musician from San Diego County, California. Joel has been making music with his band and solo for over fifty years. He is well known for his writing and performance in the style of Woody Guthrie. In this part one interview, Rafael discusses his early musical influences, his participation in the 1960s counterculture movement, and the beginnings of his success in the music industry. NOTE TRANSCRIPTION BEGIN 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:27.000 Hello, this is Jen Fabbi, and today I'm interviewing Joel Rafael for the California State University San Marcos University Library Oral History program. Today is August 20th, 2025. This interview is taking place at Joel Rafael's studio at his home in Escondido, California, which is on the unceded territory of Luiseño/Payómkawichum people. Joel, thank you for interviewing with me today. 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:29.094 You're welcome. 00:00:29.094 --> 00:00:33.725 Alright, so let's start off with the early years. When and where were you born? 00:00:33.725 --> 00:00:39.234 I was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1949, May 11th. 00:00:39.234 --> 00:00:56.274 Okay. So you've been writing and performing for over fifty years beginning in the sixth grade. So how did it come to be that you were performing at such a young age, and how did you learn to play music and-- 00:00:56.274 --> 00:06:26.115 Well, I grew up in California 'cause my parents moved us out here to the Los Angeles County area in, when I was about three years old. So I guess probably 1952. And the California school districts had a really great music programs in those days. And so I was fortunate for the whole time that I was in school up through high school there was an excellent music program in every school that I was in. So it was probably about the fourth grade a music director came around to our classroom and basically, you know, Who wants to be in the band? And handed out, I guess some kind of a permission slip. And I jumped on that right away. I already was a music lover just from playing phonograph records at home. I think I mentioned this to you before, but I was a latchkey kid before the term was invented. So, in my early elementary school days when I would get home from school, I literally had a key on a shoe string to open my door because my parents were both at work. And I would fill my time with--a lot of my time with--going through my parents' records and just exploring the music they had. So that's how my love for music first started. And then, and of course, I had a little phonograph myself with a lot of children's records and children's music and that kind of thing. But I started playing music in the fourth grade, beginning band. I started out as a drummer. I had already taken some accordion lessons because my brother, who's two years older than me was taking accordion lessons. And that was kind of the mode, you know, everything my brother did then my parents would have me do that later. And so he was playing accordion so then I was playing accordion. But I started out on this small little twelve bass accordion and progressed pretty quickly. But unfortunately, I was pretty small in stature. And so when it was time for me to move on to the bigger accordion, it was really just, it was too much to handle. So that was the end of my accordion lessons. And then it was shortly after that, that this band thing happened at school, and I decided I would play the drums, which in beginning band meant the snare drum. So that was kind of how I started out, just playing the beats on the snare drum. And at a certain point, I really wanted a drum kit. And at some point, I guess it was probably around the fifth or sixth grade--probably around the fifth grade--I was able to coerce my dad into going to a music store. I think it was in Pomona, California. And we bought a used, really put together drum set and moved that into my bedroom. And then I started to bring some of my school friends over on the weekends. My mom would take me over, we would pick up a couple of friends and bring 'em to my house. And one of 'em played the trumpet and one of 'em played the clarinet, also beginning band members. And we worked out some very simple tunes. That was kind of my first combo. And by the time I got into junior high school, a better drum kit was required. And somehow I managed to get my dad to buy that for me. And I guess my second band was a surf band in a friend's garage in the town I lived in. I would ride my bike over there. My drums were parked in the garage at his house. Robbie Brandon was his name. And he had a friend named Lynn Lewis. And they--one of them played--Robbie played guitar, electric guitar, and Lynn played bass. So it was a three-piece band. And we basically played surf band covers--a few Everly Brothers songs that required singing, and neither of them sang. So we bought a boom microphone, and I was a singing drummer. As a drummer going into high school, I started playing a, well, I guess you'd call it a cover band. We were playing the, basically the songs that were on the radio at that time. And that was about the time that The Beatles became prevalent in the years of the U.S. And we were playing some Beatles songs and Rolling Stones songs and stuff like that. School dances, sock hops. Back in those days, they didn't have DJs. We always had live bands. And so I was one of those lucky kids that was in one of those bands. And that was a great experience as a kid. It was--really felt unique to be in a musical group. So let's see, should I continue on the musical path? Am I jumping the gun here? 00:06:26.115 --> 00:06:31.110 Well, no, I think we're gonna' get into it more. 00:06:31.110 --> 00:06:33.435 Okay. I was just kind of tracing my musical-- 00:06:33.435 --> 00:06:35.245 Yeah, absolutely. 00:06:35.245 --> 00:16:42.325 --progress. From there, folk music became, started to become popular probably around 1959, 1960. And, they call it the Folk Scare of the Sixties. And I think that's because no one ever thought that folk music would be played on the radio, and some of the stuff that was played on the radio was the more commercial kind of folk stuff, like the Kingston Trio. And John Denver, I guess, was probably around that time. Chad Mitchell Trio. I think John Denver was in the Chad Mitchell Trio before he was a solo artist. So those were the songs I was listening to. I remember Joan Baez had a hit with a Phil Ochs song called, There but for Fortune, that really intrigued me. And I just felt the necessity to, at that point, to kind of step away from the drum kit and learn how to play the guitar so that I could be up front singing the songs. And so I talked my parents into going to, down to Tijuana during the summer, probably the summer of '61, maybe. And we bought a very inexpensive guitar in Tijuana. I think it was about 30, 35 dollars. And that's what I learned to play the guitar on. I had a couple of friends that were--they had, there were about four of 'em, school friends, that had put together a little group, and they were doing mostly Kingston Trio songs. And I went up to play with them when they had their rehearsals, a couple of times. Just enough to learn a few chords and a couple songs. And then I was on my own. I was a solo artist from then on. I'm not sure why, but I just decided I was gonna' do my own thing. And so I started learning songs and getting better on the guitar. Around 1960--probably the summer of 1963--might have been--it was either '63 or '64. Might have been '64. Anyways, one of those two years. My dad decided to take my family on a family vacation for the summer to Hawaii. Hawaii had just become a state like a few years earlier. And he was curious about it, and we were curious about it. So we took a trip there, and we went to a few different islands, I think three different islands. And the third island we went to was, was the island of Kauai, which was very undeveloped at the time. And so we landed in Kauai, and we stayed at a place called the Hanalei Plantation, which is still there. It's a resort hotel that was originally a sugar plantation. And at the time, I think it was the only like sort of resort or hotel to stay at on the island of Kauai. It was just, there just wasn't much there. So we checked into our rooms, and right after we got into our rooms, my parents got a phone call from a guy who had just checked in and had noticed that my parents were from the same town, Covina, California. And he invited my parents and me and my brother to come down to the little restaurant bar area at the hotel and have a drink. So we went down there to meet this guy. And this is kind of an anecdotal story, but I think it's an important one. So when we met him, he was very much like a John Wayne kind of character, big cowboy kind of dude. He'd already had a few drinks, so he was obviously a drinker. He started telling us his story. And he had told us that he was one of the original models for the Marlboro Man posters with the cowboy and the horse that you'd see along the highways at that time. And he was a stunt man, had been in the Marine Corps. He told us that he had--that they had filmed Mister Roberts there at Kauai. And they had done a lot of filming at Hanalei. And that was one of the reasons he came back there 'cause he was familiar with it. But when they did that movie, he was the guy that drove the motorcycle off the pier in the scene where the sailors get liberty and they get off the ship. And then they're celebrating, this one guy drives a motorcycle off the pier into the ocean. And it was this guy, Jack Lewis. And he told us that he was there, that he was partners with a guy in Covina that owned a magazine called Gun World, which, you know, back in the early sixties, it was a just a, an NRA type magazine, but not the NRA as the NRA is today. It was more about hunting and gun safety and the newest rifles and firearms that were on the market or whatever. And so he said, yeah, he was there to take a helicopter flight the next day into some uncharted areas of Kauai to take some photographs of this rifle that he had. And it was like a .38 caliber rifle with a telescopic sight on--like big hunting gun. And he looked at my brother and said, Do you wanna' go with me, kid? And my brother said, No. And so he looked at me and said, Do you wanna' go with me, kid? And I said, Yeah. And my dad said, no, no, no, no, he can't go. He's too young. You know, I think I was fifteen and--just had turned fifteen. And this guy goes, oh, please sir, let your son go. This will be the adventure of a lifetime. I'm not gonna' be flying the helicopter. I've chartered a pilot and a photographer, and there's four seats, so there's an extra seat in the helicopter, and you should really let your son go. This will be like a once in a lifetime experience. And my dad relented and said, okay. So next morning we go down, and there was a place where a helicopter could land at Hanalei. We walked down there and met him, and then the helicopter came in and landed, and we got in the helicopter, and we flew out over these just amazingly scenic places on the island of Kauai. And landed about three different times where this guy Jack got out and walked a hundred yards away from the helicopter and fired a couple shots and walked back towards the helicopter with the gun. And we did that about three or four times. And I think due to his alcoholic nature, he was pretty exhausted by the time we got back in the helicopter to fly back to the resort. And on the way back, he said you know, he complimented me. He said, boy, we really worked our, you know, off today. Um, you know, kid, thank you. You really helped me out. You know, he's just giving me all this hot air. And so on the way back, he says to me, How do you like this gun kid? And I, you know, I'm fifteen years old, you know, 19-early sixties, and I said, oh, you know, I love the gun. It's awesome. I don't even know what I said, but that was my, what I implied to him is that I really thought it was great. So he says, It's yours. So, you know, I'm fifteen, right? So we get off the plane and I'm carrying this rifle in a leather case, walking toward my dad, who really did not like guns at all. He was a World War II Veteran. He had been in the invasion of North Africa, and he'd seen plenty of violence that he never talked about it, but it was obvious from the way he felt about guns, even at that time in my life. And so he goes, what are you doing with that? And I go, Jack gave it to me, You know, I'm all excited. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, you don't. Well, this guy, Jack, you know, right away started again on my dad. Oh, sir, you gotta' let him keep it. He told me that you, you have a guy that works for you that goes hunting sometimes, you know, let him keep, let him keep the rifle. He was so great today. He helped me out so much. Just all this BS. And my dad relented. This was like '64. And so after we finished our trip, we flew back to Maui, I think it was, and then back to Oahu with the gun. Checked the gun and the ammunition, flew home with it, you know, it was a different time. Security was not what it is today. Flew home with a gun. The gun went in the closet, the ammo got locked away somewhere. And a month or so later, school started. And I was talking to a friend at school who lived with his dad, single parent, and they went hunting quite a bit. I told him about this gun. He really wanted to see it. And so I brought him home one day after school, and we got it out of the closet, and he looked at it. A couple days later, he called my house and said that he would really like to buy the gun from me. And he offered me $125 for the gun. So I had my eye on this guitar, down with a Covina music store. It was a G-10 Goya Swedish-made classical guitar that was real nice little guitar. And so he paid me the $125. And I went down to that store, and I bought that guitar. And I've never owned a gun since then. So I like to say my gun--my guitar is my gun, and my songs are my bullets. 00:16:42.325 --> 00:16:48.436 Mm. That's profound. So-- 00:16:48.436 --> 00:16:53.529 --that was my start playing guitar. 00:16:53.529 --> 00:17:07.025 Yeah. So can you tell me about the people or music--and you mentioned this a little bit--that influenced you at this young age, and as you moved into performing? 00:17:07.025 --> 00:21:23.755 Pretty much anything that I ran across that was like considered folk music at that time. The schools, it was all of a sudden folk music was sort of happening. It was the sixties folk movement. And the high schools were having what they called hootenannies, sort of like what you called open stages today. But they called it hootenannies, which was a term that was coined by Pete Seeger, when people would get together and share songs. And so we'd have these hootenannies, and they would be like talent contests at the various high schools. There were three high schools in our area. And so I started entering those contests after I'd learned a few songs. And wasn't really writing much at that time. I was just mostly just playing songs. So I was playing songs that were by Joan Baez, the Kingston Trio. There was a guy named Tim Morgan that was a local artist that had influenced me and another guy that I saw in Glendale. There was a lot of small clubs around at that time. Like, there was a club in Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach area called The Prison of Socrates. And it's still there, but it's like a pizza parlor now. But it was a coffee house that had folk music, like three, four nights a week there. And there was another one in Seal Beach called the Cosmos. And, of course, there was the Troubadour in Los Angeles and the Ice House in Pasadena. There was a second Ice House in Glendale. So they all had open stages. So after I kind of perfected my beginning act with a guitar, I was hitting those open stages and the hootenanny contest at the high school, and I did really well. I was, I would win the first or second place at the hootenannies. And I was able to get on those open stages. And that's kind of where I cut my teeth as a performer, as a young person. So my influences were basically just the songs I was playing, like Richie Havens was an influence. I had a record of his that had a couple of folks songs on it. One was called, Hey, Nelly. Nelly, that I liked to sing. I think that was written by Shel Silverstein. I started to pay attention to writers a little bit. I knew that the song that Joan was doing, Joan Baez was doing, There but for Fortune, was a Phil Ochs song. I heard about Bob Dylan, but I didn't know too much about him. My next door neighbor, who was a couple years older than me, had a Bob Dylan album that she had bought, and she didn't really care for it that much, so she gave it to me 'cause I was curious, And it was, I think it was Bob Dylan's probably his third album. You know, it took me like three albums to actually hear Bob Dylan. It was Another Side of Bob Dylan was the album. And at the first listening, it just like, really took me back. Whoa, that's just so different. You know? It was just I won't say it was repelling or bad, like some people have said. It was just different, you know, it was just so different the way he was using his voice and the barrage of words in the songs. So I picked a couple of songs off of that record that I learned how to play. So he was an influence. Woody Guthrie was an influence, but I didn't really realize it because Woody died the year I graduated from high school, and he was hospitalized for, I think for maybe close to fourteen years before he died. He was institutionalized with Huntington's Disease. And so his songs were around, you know, This Land Is Your Land and This Train (is Bound for Glory), and John Henry, and a few others that were kind of in the popular repertoire that these other groups were doing. So I was hearing groups do some Woody Guthrie songs. So they were, in that sense, some of the first songs I learned how to play, ironically. So that was kind of my high school experience, you know? And so I guess we could pick it up from there. I'm not-- 00:21:23.755 --> 00:21:26.924 Yeah. When did you start writing music? 00:21:26.924 --> 00:21:29.394 I actually wrote probably my first couple of songs-- 00:21:29.394 --> 00:21:32.781 Well, and I guess, how did you learn, that's-- 00:21:32.781 --> 00:29:30.000 Yeah. Well, I don't know. I just, it was just something that I felt I could do. I was listening to songs and deciding which songs I liked. You know, there were songs that stood out and caught me up that I wanted to learn. Some of 'em were too complex for me to learn. I wasn't, skilled enough to just to discern that they were a simple song. But they, by virtue of being in a different key, it was like I could only play in a couple of keys. I had a capo, but I didn't really understand key transitions. I didn't understand that if you put a capo on the second fret of your guitar and play a G, it's actually an A, you know? So you got the whole circle of keys working up the neck of the guitar. And I understood that if I needed the song to be higher, I would move the capo up. If I needed it to be lower, I would move it down or take it off the guitar. But I didn't really know what key I was playing in or understand the relationships between the chord, the chords that were in a certain key. That all kind of came later just from experience, I think. And you meet people along the way. Like I've always--David Amram is the one that said this best. And I've always tried to emulate what he said. He said, I always hang around--try to hang around with people that are smarter than me and more skilled than me because that's how you learn to get better. You know, you don't want to be hanging around with people that--you don't wanna always be the best person there because then you don't ever learn anything. So I try to surround myself with people that know more than I know and are better players than I am, better songwriters than I am, because that's how you improve and develop. And I think that's good advice for anything that, any endeavor. So, let's see, where was I? So in high school, that was a very turbulent time for me. I don't know if that's our next category or not, but as I moved into high school, there was a lot going on. My freshman year in high school, John Kennedy was assassinated, A few years later, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, and Malcolm X was assassinated. So this all happened in my youth. And, but these things, these killings of political figures, it was something that was, in my consciousness, was a historical thing. Like Lincoln had been assassinated, and that seemed like to me, as a teenager, seemed like a really long time ago. So, I guess I should mention. So, when I went into high school, I experienced every new school in my area. Okay. So, like in elementary school, I started off in a school called Barranca School. I went there for a year. And then they transferred me over to a new school in West Covina called the Vine School. After two years or three years at the Vine School, they split the districts into West Covina and Covina districts. And I was in the Covina District. So then I went to the new elementary school in the sixth grade, which was a brand new school. So like, no trees, no landscaping, just concrete and pavement and dirt. And so then when I went to junior high school, I went to the established junior high school for one year, my seventh grade year. But in eighth grade, they had built a new junior high school, and they fed that with the two established junior high schools from--depending on where you lived, were fed into that third junior high school. So that was my third new school--no trees, no landscaping, dirt, concrete and pavement. And that was the Sierra Vista Junior High School. And then I went back over to Covina High School, which was the established high school for my freshman year, but they had incorporated--that year they took away one of the junior highs, which was the first junior I'd gone to in seventh grade. That became the campus for most of the freshman classes. But there were some classes, depending on what your curriculum was that you would cross the street over to the high school, to Covina High School. So I was on my way, probably about ten in the morning--I don't, maybe it was eleven in the morning on my way from the junior high school campus--the freshman campus--to the high school campus to go to my French class, first year French. And somebody ran by me and said, President Kennedy's been shot. And I was just like, What? You know, I just made my way to my class and my teacher was crying, and everybody, we found out about it, and it was just like, it was so devastating. It's hard to explain how devastating that was. Because these kind of events we take for granted now. They happen so frequently. We hear about people being killed, or mass shootings, or we hear about even political leaders being killed, heads of corporations being targeted. And it's just like the news of the day. But like when I was, I guess I was thirteen, to have somebody run by and say, the President's been shot. That was shocking, you know? And, and I remember they ended school day that day--within about an hour they ended the school day. And by the time I got home, he was pronounced dead. And I just remember that the silence. There was this silence everywhere. We went up to get something to eat at a restaurant, and there were some other people there, but it was just completely silent and somber. So that was a very emotional experience, and I think it, in some ways, it set a tone for the rest of my experience as a kid. A lot of questions. So then, after my freshman year in high school, there was a new high school near my house. So I went to the new high school as a sophomore. And that was the year that--the summer before my sophomore year was the year that I received that rifle and swapped it for the guitar. So, as a sophomore in high school, I was starting to play the guitar quite a bit and be known kind of as a folk singer. Let's see. (Tear in my eye, sorry.) So, let's see. Moving on through high school. I was politically oriented by the time I got into high school when we had moved to the town of Covina. I guess I should back up. When we first moved to California, we lived with one of my aunts and uncles, my dad's sister, for a few months before we got our own place in La Canada, which is near Pasadena. 00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:31.000 Beautiful. 00:29:31.000 --> 00:37:00.704 Yeah. And it was pretty rural at that time outside of Pasadena. My dad had a business in Pasadena--a screen door company. We lived there for about three years. And then we moved to Covina. I didn't know until just a couple years ago--we actually lived in West Covina--even though we were right on the edge of Covina, my dad's business was in Covina, I was in the Covina School District. Even though we were in West Covina, technically. And the reason we were in West Covina--I found out later--was because there was a red line in Covina, and if you were Jewish, you couldn't buy a home in Covina. And some--my dad, we were Jewish and not religious, but just happened to be Jewish. And Covina was an area where there just, there wasn't really any any sign of other Jews around. It was pretty much, you were really in the minority. I mean, you were already in the minority, but I mean, when you moved, when we moved to Covina, there weren't any synagogues or temples, not really a path to continue being religious in any way. We weren't really that religious anyways, I don't think. My dad's family was, I guess what you'd call reformed Jews, pretty liberal Jews. And so there was that sense of isolation a little bit. And I know that my dad he wanted to join the golf club and was turned down. Many years later when my dad had established himself as a community leader, they invited him to join, and he didn't. He turned them down. So, let's see. I had a political orientation because my dad ran for school board. There was a couple of propositions on the ballot when I was--you know, I wasn't voting or anything, but I was just in my parents' household. And I was exposed to the politics that they were experiencing. And at the time that that red line was not just for Jews, but it was also for Black people. And I think probably for Latinos. And there was a law that came up for repeal. It was called the Rumford Act (Rumford Fair Housing Act). And it was the repeal of the Rumford Act--I guess it allowed people to discriminate when selling their house. So if somebody came to buy your house and they were of a minority that you didn't approve of, then you could legally just say that it wasn't for sale anymore or whatever. So there was a repeal of that law that came up, and my dad got really got behind it--a repeal of the Rumford Act. So you couldn't, you could not discriminate anymore. And that passed. And as a kid, we drove around town in a van putting up stickers on telephone poles and anywhere we could put stickers for the No on whatever the proposition was. Fourteen. I can't remember. (It was Proposition 14.) So that was kind of my early political experience, standing up for something that was important to my dad turned out to be important to me, too, in the long run. Although I probably, as any kid, I was probably pretty much unaware of what the real issues were. But I remember the '60 presidential convention. It was on my television, like for the whole time it was on, and I--and that's when I first saw John Kennedy and was just completely taken up with his charisma as a kid. We see films now and stuff, but it's hard to, I think, to really grasp the experience of that time--how it affected the Baby Boomer youth. Anyways, so my dad ran for school board and because there were two seats open on the school board, and there was already two members of the school board that were members of the John Birch Society, which is--I like to describe as the embryo of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement. They were headquartered in a town called San Marino, and I dunno, they were ultraconservative, extremist organization--right-wing extremist organization. And my dad--there were also two people running for the two seats on the board that were also in the John Birch Society. So there would've been four members of the school board if they won, that were in the John Birch Society. And there were about maybe fifteen people running for those two seats. And it's a nonpartisan election. It's not a Democrat or Republican election. It's completely nonpartisan. But these John Birch Society members had made it into a partisan thing because they wanted to (reject) federal funding for schools and wanted to write their own local curriculum, a lot like what Oklahoma's doing right now and Florida and some other states. So he got together with a friend of his that was, just happened to be my pediatrician, and my dad was what you would call in those days moderate Democrat. And my pediatrician was a moderate Republican and explained the situation, and they decided that they would form a ticket. And then they invited all of the people that were running for the two seats except for the two members of the John Birch Society over to our house and had a meeting. And basically the end of the meeting was that everyone would drop out of the election and get behind my dad and and my doctor as a ticket to defeat extremists that were trying to take over the school board. And they won. And then my dad later became the president of the school board. So that had a very strong impact on me. Just the strategy of doing that and the way that they managed to win in that situation. That was probably when I was like a freshman or sophomore. So, let's see. Going on from there, what's the next thing on the list? 00:37:00.704 --> 00:37:05.215 Right. So obviously during that time of turmoil of the Vietnam War-- 00:37:05.215 --> 00:37:06.684 --okay. I was thinking that might be right. 00:37:06.684 --> 00:37:11.224 And so the question was how did the Vietnam War affect to your life path and music? 00:37:11.224 --> 00:37:16.625 Majorly. Majorly. 00:37:16.625 --> 01:00:48.764 I guess we started hearing about it when I was a sophomore, just hardly anything. And by the time I was a junior, we're hearing more about it. We didn't know where Vietnam was. Never had heard of Vietnam. I mean at that time, the world was a lot smaller place. It's like sixty years ago. By the time I was a senior, the reality that I was gonna' have to register for the draft on my eighteenth birthday just became more real to me. It wasn't something I really thought about that much, but approaching the age of eighteen, I knew that as soon as I was eighteen, I was required to register for the draft. And there wasn't a lottery or anything then. It was just, you just had to register for the draft. And then it was really more about your pre-induction physical and whether you were going to college, depending on whether you would get a deferment or what category you would be placed into. And I gotta' say, I didn't know anything about the war. I think maybe the bodies were just starting to come home, but we weren't seeing that much of that yet. But I knew it was a war, and I knew that some people that were drafted were being sent over there. And it was scary. It was scary to me 'cause I was already basically, I think, probably by influence of the songs and stuff that I had been learning, I was already pretty much decidedly anti-war. And I was never like a physically, like a fighter, you know? It just wasn't in my nature. And so the whole idea of it really scared me. And there was one teacher that I had that was a Navy veteran. And I don't know if I just went and talked to him or somehow, he ended up kind of counseling me about it. And he was just sort of really downplaying it, like most people don't get hurt when they're in the military. The percentage of people that are actually wounded and hurt is really low compared to the percentage of people that are in the military. And you have as much chance of being killed in an auto accident as you do of being wounded or killed in a war. I wasn't buying any of it, you know, I just wasn't buying it. And it didn't help me one bit, that conversation. So my birthday came around, I registered for the draft. I was planning to go to college, which I did. I think that was a tough road for me right then because my brother, who was two years older, had gone through this whole thing before me and was in college. He was like, I think he was a junior when I was gonna' be a freshman. And he picked a school to go do that was very expensive. And somehow my parents managed to come up with the money to put him through school at USC (University of Southern California). And then when it was my turn to go, I think they were just kind of--they had kind of done that and kind of burned up the budget, burned up the program, burned up the energy on it. It's a lot to get your kid into college. A lot of support system that's needed and hooking you up with the right information and the right kind of counseling. I didn't have good counseling at school.and my parents were just, I think they were just busy. And so I didn't get a lot of guidance about school. My grades were, they were good enough to get into college, but they were marginally good enough to get into college. I had a couple of subject areas that, I was like a C student and mostly Bs and a couple As maybe. So I applied to Cal State Fullerton. It was a new school, and it was close by. And it was convenient. It wasn't necessarily a school that I wanted to go to or that I--it was just, it was sort of the most convenient four-year school. And I applied there, and I got in. So I went to Cal State Fullerton for my freshman year. My first semester I did okay. But by the time my second semester rolled around, I was pretty deeply immersed in--well, I guess you'd call it counterculture transition. Really started probably in my senior year. There just started to be--I don't even know how it all started, the whole counterculture thing. Maybe it was because there was experimentation being done and articles being written and featured in papers and magazines about LSD and about increased cannabis use and the younger generation and the Sunset Strip and the hippies on the Sunset Strip. That would just, was all just happening right in front of me as I was about to leave high school, my senior year in high school. So probably towards the end of my senior year in high school, I started smoking pot with some friends. There weren't very many people that were doing it. Like in my school, there were probably, I could probably count on my hand the people in my high school that I knew that had also smoked pot. And the interesting thing about it was that the demographic of those seven to ten people crossed all social lines. And that hadn't happened to me before. When I was in high school, the social scene was a caste system. There were the poor kids, there were the Mexican kids that were like--the element of the Latino population that were more like the sort of the, I dunno' if they were in gangs, but just had that energy. They dressed differently. They were kind of like the greasers, you know? And then they were the soces (socials or socialites) that had a little bit more money, mostly college prep kids, that dressed a little nicer, you know? And I was kind of on the edge of that group, you know? And, but all of a sudden, people that I would never have talked to or never have known or interacted with were people that I had smoked pot with on the weekend. So at school, all of a sudden you're crossing those lines. You're walking to class and you encounter somebody that's not in your social group at all, and it's like, Hey, Tony! Hey Joel! And other people are going like, Well, how do you know him? It was, but it was very open. There was a--something about it that felt really good in that kind of opening of societal boundaries. And so the last, probably last semester of high school, was very much that kind of a atmosphere, where I was interacting with kids that I hadn't normally interacted with. (We're doing okay there.) And so that kind of set the tone for my college experience. So by my second semester of college, I had--through a guy who was one of my best friends in college and his brother--kind of found my way down to Laguna Beach, which was like, you know, Fullerton was, from where I lived, halfway to Laguna Beach already, And my best friend's brother was the same age as my brother. He was two years older. But they had immigrated here from Canada, like maybe around eighth grade, freshman year high school. So they were basically Canadians, but they were living here. And this Canadian kid, Don, he became my best friend. And his brother was not a soc. He was more, you know, they didn't have a lot of money, my friends. So him being a little older, was kind of in that poor kid, not gonna' be going to college.. perceived as tough and dangerous. They weren't, they were just kids like us, but that was the perception. So anyways, he ended up initially turning us on to marijuana. And it became kind of a regular thing for us, but it moved us away from alcohol. So--'cause a lot of us were drinking at parties and stuff like that, stuff that kids do sometimes in high school. I was definitely open to experimentation as a teenager. So that through him and some people he knew from Claremont that moved to Laguna Beach, I ended up spending the summer--a lot of my second semester and the summer after--in Laguna Beach. And by the time that the school year was rolling around again, I was also spending a lot of time in Los Angeles because there, that's where the open stages were and I was playing music on the Troubadour and the Ice House and the Ash Grove on their open stage nights. And then any other places I could play little coffee houses, that was all still kind of happening. And so I didn't go back to Cal State Fullerton. I decided I was going to enroll at LA City College, the community college in Los Angeles, which would satisfy my 2-S status with the draft. That was basically the reason I was gonna' continue school. I didn't have any academic goals at that point. My goal was to stay out the Army, stay out of the military. And continue hanging out with my counterculture friends. And playing music. And so I rented an apartment in Los Angeles. I got a job working at a liquor store on Sunset Boulevard called Turner Liquors, right on the Sunset Strip. And I was a delivery boy to the stars. So all these movie stars that lived up in the Hollywood Hills and Beverly Hills and everywhere would order their liquor from this place called Turner Liquor Store. And I was the delivery boy. So I met a lot of really interesting people during that time that I delivered liquor to from that store. I worked there for probably, I don't know, probably six months. I went to register at LA Community College. I was late. I went like the last day to register. The way I tell the story is I paid my, whatever it was, $65 or $70 registration fees, went around to pick my classes, which were pretty much--everything I wanted to take was filled. And, pretty much all that was left was like second year basket weaving, prerequisite required. So before the night was over, I went back to the office and just gave them everything back, and they gave me my money back. And I was out of school. Within a few months, I was 1-A with a draft. And that was in 1968. The end of 1968. So my parents were very concerned, like, You need to be in school. Why did you drop out of school? Now you're gonna', now you're a 1-A. You're gonna' get drafted. I said, I'm not gonna' go. My dad encouraged me to apply for a conscientious objector status. So I went through that process, and at the same time, my friends in Laguna--I just, I was hanging out there a lot. There were a lot of acid trips, other psychedelics--no hard drugs but just basically marijuana and mescalin and LSD, mind-expanding experiences with other people, like-minded people. And they had determined--because the police were starting to be very, more proactively enforcing against the counterculture. You know, anybody that looked like a hippie or had long hair or wore bell bottoms or a tie-dyed shirt, you were a target to the police. And in Southern California, it was particularly hostile in certain towns, more so than others. And a few of our friends that were like maybe a little older in the counterculture had moved up to Oregon, up to the Northwest. They were gonna'--in groups, communal groups, we were gonna buy property, find jobs up there and try to make a new life, a different value system. And the people that I was kind of hanging out with decided they were gonna' go to Oregon, and they really wanted me to go with them. And it was big decision time. I was in sort of in the middle of my conscientious objector application process. I had to apply, and then they set up a meeting or an interview with the draft board. Between the time that I applied, which was probably a few months until I got my interview, I was counseled by a guy, who was like a Quaker. He was the father of a friend of mine who, father of a person--who actually later became the guitar player in my, in the Joel Rafael Band--that we'd gone to school together and played a little bit of music together. But he, his, they were Quaker background, and he was counseling kids on the draft because they were pacifists and were encouraging kids that wanted to be conscientious objectors, trying to help them succeed at getting a conscientious objector status. It became known to me at that time that if you were Jewish, your chances of getting a CO were very slim just because you were Jewish, by reputation, I guess, I don't know--Jewish people were thought of as fighters. I don't know why, but it was just a fact that if you were a Jew, you could get a CO, but it wasn't likely. So I did everything I could with, through the counseling, to learn what I could to have a proper interview. And I went for my interview and within a month or two after my interview, they sent me a 1-A. Sorry, you're a 1-A. And so that was about the time that we moved up to Oregon, about twelve or thirteen of us, caravanned up there in a few different vehicles. We didn't have a place. We were just going to the home of some other people that we knew that had moved up there who said, Yeah, you can come and stay with us until you could find a place and get jobs and this kind of thing. And so we headed up there--I just kind of just put it behind me. I didn't care. I was 1-A, I didn't care. I, it was like, Screw the draft board, screw the military, screw the Vietnam War. I'm not going, I don't believe in any of that stuff. And other things are important to me. So I'm going with my friends to the Northwest, and we're gonna' somehow buy a piece of property, and we're all gonna' build our own houses on the property, and we're gonna' have our own community. This is kind of the dream. I see the counterculture people at that time in a couple of different categories. So there were the antiwar protestors. There were the, just the flat out druggies that just, you know, went down. And then the back-to-the-landers. And that was kind of my group. New value system, back to the Earth, all that stuff. And so that formed my value system. I think that, and I've freely admitted that I think that psychedelics had something to do with that. I have friends and for myself as well, you know, when people ask me, How did you become an artist? You know, how did you remain an artist? Sometimes it surprisingly it will start with, Well, when I was a young adult, I took some LSD. That sounds funny, but I mean, there's a truth to that. And now people are microdosing on some of these things, like people that you would never imagine would even try something like that. Or using it for like, mental health therapy and stuff. I think that the counterculture--us counterculture kids--actually pioneered some stuff that stuck. We didn't change the world like we thought we were going to, but we did help perpetrate some changes. So we got up there, and I was contacted--forwarded a letter from my parents saying you're 1-A. You need to be at your draft--at this address on this date for a pre-induction physical to determine if you're physically fit to be in the military. So I'm in Oregon, and I'm supposed to come down to California to go for a physical, and I'm just thinking like, I'm not gonna' get down there for that. And so somebody, I don't know if, how I thought of it, somebody must have said like, Well, why don't you write to your draft board and tell 'em you live in Oregon now? So I did that, and it took them a minimum of three months--it might have been longer, it might have been four months or five months--before they wrote me back and said, Okay, your draft board has now changed to Eugene, Oregon. And this is your pre-induction physical notice. So you're to go to the induction center in Eugene,--or maybe it was in Portland, I don't know where it was--for your pre-induction physical on such-and-such date. So I thought, well, I guess I'll just write them a letter and tell 'em I moved back to California, which I did, and they followed suit several months later, changed my draft board back to Pasadena and sent me another pre-induction physical notice. So then I wrote them another letter, and I told them that I've moved up to Washington state. And so a couple months later I got a letter that said, We've determined that you are avoiding your pre-induction physical. And so on such-and-such date, you are to go to any draft board anywhere and report for an induction physical. And if you're found to be physically fit, you'll be immediately inducted into the armed services. Well, we were living, at that point, we had separated from the group that we had moved up there with. And we were just like a couple and we had-- 01:00:48.764 --> 01:00:50.018 --so this is you-- 01:00:50.018 --> 01:00:51.157 me and Lauren. Yeah. 01:00:51.157 --> 01:00:52.525 And where did you meet? 01:00:52.525 --> 01:00:53.000 We met in high school. 01:00:53.000 --> 01:00:55.317 Okay. 01:00:55.317 --> 01:21:17.420 Yeah, Lauren and I met in high school. Just to backtrack a little bit. I guess it was my junior year. We were both in a play together. And my mother had been--who knew Lauren's mother through the PTA or something--had asked me a few different times, Do you know so-and-so's daughter? She's a year younger than you. Do you know her? I don't think so, but I was kind of wondering who she was. And then I realized that she was in the play. And so she was in the--we had like a multi-purpose room that was where we did our high school plays. And one day, we were there for a rehearsal right near the beginning of the play. And I walked up and introduced myself to her, and she knew who I was, and I offered her a ride home. I had a license at that point, I was a junior. And gave her a ride home, and we started dating, and we had a very up-and-down relationship for my junior and senior year. You know, we were boyfriend and girlfriend and then we broke up, and then we got back together, and then we broke up, and then we got back together. And then when I was gonna' be leaving for high school (college), I was already on my counterculture journey, and she wasn't. And it just, it wasn't gonna' work out. And so I just broke it off. 'Cause I'm going to college. I'm not gonna' be in town anymore. In fact, I moved out of my house maybe two weeks before I graduated from high school. And she wasn't having it, so she followed me, and she finally caught up with me in Laguna Beach at my friend's place. And so she ended up, she was a freshman at Cal State Fullerton also, which she had applied to go to 'cause she thought that I was going there. But then found out that I dropped out. But now she's at Cal State Fullerton. So she then dropped out of school and took the journey north with the whole group. When we got up there, we were kind of estranged at that point. We were like, What is she doing here? You know? We were so young, you know? So we got up there and within, probably within a month, we figured out that the two of us had a whole lot more in common than the people we'd moved up there with--that come from a different background, different value system even than ours, and not one that we could abide. And so it seemed like an eternity, but it really didn't take that long before we split off and--to make our own way. Got into some trouble in Portland, Oregon. I've got a song about it called Old Portland Town. And there was a pretty vibrant counterculture scene in Portland at that time. And Portland was not the city it is today. In fact, I don't know if you know the history of Portland, but it was one of the--it was very racist at one time. And so nothing like it is today. It's one of the more liberal cities in the country now. But at that time, I think that the general population, like what you would call the typical society, this, I don't know how to really describe it, but just the society in general was very intolerant of the counterculture. And so there was a lot of police. There was a very big counterculture scene in Portland, and it was different than down here. Maybe it was just different than what I'd experienced, but in Portland, it was like the whole counterculture, the whole underground, was like one scene. Whereas down here, the people I was hanging with, we were all sort of like-minded. We weren't druggies. We were smoking pot, and we were experimenting with psychedelics, but we weren't doing hard drugs. But in Portland, the hard druggies, the thieves, the hippies, I mean, it was all just mixed up, you know? And there was--they infiltrated the scene with an undercover cop, who infiltrated the scene for about six months. And that was when Nixon was President. And they had, he had the Department of Justice had instigated the no-knock law. So they didn't need warrants to, if they wanted to raid somebody or search their premises, they could just do it with, I guess with probable cause. But they didn't need a warrant. And they had, so they had the no-knock law, and they had another thing called secret indictments, which instead of, once the grand jury had published an indictment for someone, instead of a warrant being issued, they would just stick that over in a file and just like accumulate indictments on a particular scene, which was the counterculture scene in Portland, basically. And so, while we were in Portland--we had actually, we had been down here. We had just come back up to Portland, and we were visiting at a friend's house, and the door got kicked in. And it was raided by a bunch of cops and plain clothes cops, all their guns drawn. It's pretty scary. And there was probably about twelve of us just hanging around at somebody, at this friend's house getting high. And they kicked in the door and then they basically took each one of us into the bathroom and searched us. And they--I think they called a matron for the girls that were there. And they had two secret indictments on me for sales of hashish. And what I had done is I had given a piece of hashish to this undercover guy, who we didn't trust. When we saw him--the first time we saw him--we were sure he was a undercover guy, sure he was a narc. This was what we called, undercover cops back then were narcs, narcotics officers. Well we were sure he was an undercover narc, and we would have nothing to do with him. People were telling us like, Oh no, he's cool. I got high with him the other day. This kind of stuff. And so after several months went by on a very rainy day, we encountered this guy at a park, where a lot of people used to hang out at Laurelhurst Park in Portland. And there was hardly anybody there. Just us, and he walked up to us and started talking with us. And we were standoffish at first, talking and talking. And then finally he said, Well, I'm gonna' go over to the donut shop down at the corner over there and get some coffee. If you guys wanna' come along, I'll treat. And it was rainy, and it was cold, and we went with him. And we sat there and visited with him for quite a while. And I ended up giving him a piece of hashish--break it off--a piece of hashish that I had, giving him a piece of it. And that ended up being two indictments for sales. And so I had to go through that whole court process up there. It really tied up the whole judicial system because they busted about, I think about 280 people over a period of like three days. So they literally had to empty the drunk tank at the jail. They had to empty the juvenile tank at the county jail to move us all into the jail. And so they moved us from the city jail. I guess we went for an indictment and then they moved us into the county jail, issued us uniforms. It was pretty intense. For some reason, Lauren's charges got dropped. So they arrested her, too, but then they dropped her charges--'cause they didn't really have anything on her--the next day. But they had these two indictments on me. There was a bail bondsman that was interested in bailing me out, but my parents decided that they would leave me in jail for a week or two to teach me a lesson. I'm not sure it was a really good lesson. But it affected me pretty heavily. I felt pretty abandoned in there. And finally got out, went to trial, and got two five-year probations concurrent. So it was ten years worth of probation, but they were run concurrently. So it was like, I'd be on probation for five years. And that was in 1969. So other thing--I had to leave the state of Oregon. So we came back down here under the, theoretically under the jurisdiction of my parents. But I moved in with a friend in Los Angeles, and Lauren moved in back with her parents. But we were still a couple. Eventually we found a place in Laurel Canyon, a little house. And this was 1970, so it was right when the Laurel Canyon music scene was just like in full swing. Crosby, Stills & Nash were making their second record. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, I guess would've been. And I got a job. I had learned to do leather, to sew leather clothes from a friend that I had met in my travels--that stayed with us for a while in Oregon, and he had moved on. But he had taught me how to make leather, how to stitch with an awl and stitch leather stuff. And so I got a job at North Beach Leather in Los Angeles. And one of the people that worked there was David Crosby's girlfriend. So in the afternoons, a couple times a week, David would come into the shop, and I dunno' if you remember any of the early pictures of David Crosby, but he always had the leather jacket with the fringe. Well, it came from North Beach Leather. So he would come in to see his girlfriend towards the end of the day, and he was a very down-to-earth, kind of just easygoing person. So that's when I first met David Crosby. Turned out--and this was after, I don't know if you know his history at all--but he had a girlfriend that was killed in a car crash around that time, previous to when I met him. So this girl that I knew, her name was Shelly, that worked at North Beach Leather also, she was his current girlfriend. And she was living in a little house up in Laurel Canyon. But he, David wanted her to move on to his yacht. He had a yacht called the Mayan, you know, famously known yacht, sailboat of David Crosby's. And so she moved on his sailboat and gave us her little house in Laurel Canyon. So we lived there for maybe, I don't know, the rest of the year, maybe six or seven months, while I worked at the leather shop. And then I got a letter from my friend, who had taught me how to do leather. And he was in Seattle, and he was--he had rented a grocery store, like a little grocery store, corner market type thing, a very old neighborhood market. And there was an apartment upstairs. And he had rented that place--it was no longer a market--so he was turning that into a leather shop and was living in the apartment. It was a two bedroom apartment upstairs. And he invited me and Lauren to come up there and help him start this leather shop. So we moved to Seattle, and that was in 1970. I'm still on probation, so they had to change my probation officer to Seattle. I had like monthly visits to a probation officer. They didn't have drug tests back then, so I was never drug tested, but I would have to go visit my probation officer once a month, just check in. I guess he just sort of looked me over and decided if I was okay or not, I'm not sure. But I had, I think, three different probation officers during that time. So we lived in Seattle for not a year. He ended up finding a girlfriend, and she moved in with us. We had had a perfect trio, you know, a perfect triad. But then when she moved in, it just completely messed up the dynamic. And all of a sudden it just, everything was like a lot of friction, and we realized that we needed to leave. So we started looking for another place, and we found, we drove north to where the town of Everett is, north of Seattle. And we went up into the mountains just looking for a place. Like we were literally looking for some old shack or some old house that we could move into, maybe even squat into, but we were just looking for some other place to live. I was twenty, I guess I was twenty years old, and Lauren was like nineteen or something like that. So we, I'm trying to think. Sometimes my chronology's not perfect. Anyway, we moved up there, we moved out of the place in Seattle, and we found a place on the Mountain Loop Highway that runs from a town called Granite Falls. Like we would take the road towards Snohomish, and then you'd hit this town called Granite Falls. And then from there, there was a Mountain Loop Road that went through the mountains through the Cascades--western side of the Cascades--and then came back down in Arlington, Washington, which is like further north. And we got up on that road outta' Granite Falls, and we found a place for rent up there. It was called the Olympic Motel. And it were these little cabins about the size of this room. The whole cabin was about the size of this room. And then there was like a house that the manager lived in, and we rented one of those cabins, I think it was like 60 dollars a month. And we put a wood stove in it, and we lived there for about a month. And one day I was driving up a little further up the road, and there was this old house, like a really old barnwood-looking house. And there were two guys working on a car in the driveway in front of the house. It was like a driveway and a creek and a little bridge over the creek and then this house. And then they were working on this car, and they were both like a counterculture, like hippie types, you know, long hair and--and I thought, Wow, it's some of my people. So I pulled over, and I went over and introduced myself. And they took me across the street and through the woods, there was another little cabin there that a couple other, another couple lived in. So I met them. They were all from Illinois, had migrated to the west and were on their way to Canada to avoid the draft. And turned out that the one couple in the small cabin had been in a fender banger accident and didn't have any insurance and were being kind of chased down by the people who they'd had the accident with. Nobody had been hurt but just for insurance. And so they were kind of on the run. They didn't know what to do, so they were gonna' go back to Illinois. So they left, and they said, You can have our house. I said, Well, what's the arrangement? They said, Well somebody in Marysville owns it, and they only use it during the summertime 'cause they have a Girl Scout group. And it was about the size of this room also, but it was a cedar shake covered cabin--very rustic looking cabin--right on the Stillaguamish River, maybe fifty, sixty yards from the Stillaguamish River. And so they moved out, and we moved in. A few months later, the landlord came up one day and knocked on the door. And it wasn't the same people that he told could live in the house, right? So, he told us we could stay there until April. And then that they used the place from April until, I guess, August. And so we'd have to be gone for the summer. So when the summer was over, looking for a place again, we couldn't find one. And we just decided to look up those people in Marysville. So what I did is we went down to a friend of ours' house, and she cut my hair, and my hair was like, down to about here (elbow length). She cut my hair probably about like it is now. And then we went as a couple to this house in Marysville, where the landlord lived and pleaded our case. And, you know, We'd really like to move back in there for the winter. And he said, Well, the outhouse that you've been using--'Cause there was no bathroom. It was an outhouse. Everything was no utilities. We would get our water from a spring in a bucket, like gas cans that were for water. And then we'd pour that in a barrel that has spigot on it over our sink. So we'd have to fill that up about every four days or something like that. It was definitely a back-to-the-land thing. We had kerosene lamps for light, cook stove to cook stuff on. And they said, Well, you can move back in there and pay us 5 dollars a month and build an outhouse, because the outhouse we were using was on the next property over. So we agreed, built the outhouse, and lived there for the next winter. During that winter, we realized that Lauren was pregnant with Jamaica. And we were-- 01:21:17.420 --> 01:21:44.861 That was in 1970? 01:21:44.861 --> 01:21:45.916 That was in 1971. 01:21:45.916 --> 01:21:46.334 Okay. 01:21:46.334 --> 01:24:02.540 And my dad had died in 1970. We had come down to get some leather for the leather shop. Lauren and I had borrowed a friend's panel truck, and we drove down to her parents' house, and we were staying there, and my dad was having some health issues, and he went into the hospital for some tests. And then that morning, about three in the morning, Lauren's mom came in and woke us up and said, Your dad passed away. So we stuck around for about another week and then headed back up north to the leather shop. I was twenty-one, so I lost my dad early. He was sixty-one years old. So we were in this cabin and now we're gonna' have a baby, and one of the guys--the guy who was the manager at the Olympic Hotel and I had become friends, and he was kind of mechanically inclined. And so we found this old Chevy truck. It was a '53 Chevy pickup truck that was parked in an old field. It was like a dead truck out in the field. And bought it for 50 dollars and then he helped me basically rebuild the engine and do like a valve job and a few different things on it. He knew how to do all that stuff. So together we worked on that and got that truck running. And my mom told me, she said, Well look, my dad and my mom had bought some property three miles from here on the same road, just on the other side of 395. Like if you go across 395, the first driveway you hit goes up the hill to the top of the hill over there, three miles from here. And they had bought ten acres there to retire on in 1962, and they had developed it into an avocado orchard. And once my dad passed away whenever my mom would get anything from that property, she would just take it and stick it in a drawer 'cause she couldn't deal with it. And so a few years went by. So '71 rolls around, three years after my dad died, and we were gonna' have a baby. And she says, Well, I will put a mobile home or a trailer on the property if you'll come down and take care of it and help me get out debt with the property, you know, with the grove service. And so that sounded pretty good to us. So that's when we moved back to California. And I was still on probation. And now we're getting to how did I support myself, right? Is that coming up? 01:24:02.540 --> 01:24:19.404 So the move to North County and how, what you did for work during that time. 01:24:19.404 --> 01:28:44.479 So we actually had had Jamaica. We moved onto that property, and we built a shed that looks kind of like the shed I have out in back here. And we moved into that shed. She was like seven or eight months pregnant. And we had a friend that was maybe five years older than us that had her last baby that was natural childbirth--Lamaze method. And she'd had a midwife and a doctor that did home deliveries. And we decided that we wanted to do that. It was unheard of at the time. So we got a lot of criticism from people about that. But we hired this doctor. My brother actually helped me with the money for the doctor, and he agreed to deliver our baby. But he wouldn't come and deliver it in the shed we were living in 'cause we didn't have the trailer yet. And the baby was due in August. We'd been there for the summer. And so my brother was out of town. He lived in San Dimas. So he told us we could stay at his house and have the baby there. So we had the baby at my brother's house in San Dimas, but we were living on this property. And then within a month or so after that, the trailer was moved on--it was like a mobile home, and it was moved onto the property. And we set up household there. I got--my first job was with the grove service that had been taking care of my mom's property. Not to take care of my mom's property, though, but to just to work for them. And I got sent out with a crew of migrant workers to clear some weeds on a hill near Fallbrook. They dropped me off. We loaded in the back of a truck, and they drove us out to different places and dropped us here and there and everywhere. And they dropped me out on Reche Road next to this bank that had to have the weeds cleared with one of those weed sticks. So I did that for about a week and got a real appreciation for how hard the work is that migrant workers have to do. But then, luckily, I was looking for another job the whole time, and I got a job at an irrigation supply at Fallbrook called Southwest Irrigation. And I was like a counter boy, like basically when people come in to buy couplings and elbows and tees and pipe, I would wait on them at the counter. And then I also was, would deliver pipe out to the big jobs they were developing into orchards and kiwis and avocados and all that kind of stuff. At the same time, around that same time, we took a class from the agricultural extension on avocado farming 'cause we had ten acres of avocados that were just coming into production on my mom's property. My mom and my brother were pretty much in charge of all of that 'cause he had taken over my dad's business, and was just considered more legitimate than us. We were like counterculture, like not to be trusted or whatever. So I mean, not that they didn't trust us, but I think that they just--I don't think they thought they could depend on us, you know? So they kind of ran the show, and we needed resources, and I had friends I'd met around here that, we'd learned about avocado farming. And I had other friends that were farmers, and we were trying to do as right as we could by that orchard because it was just coming into production. And there were some things that needed to be done. They needed some equipment they didn't have. We just had our little car that we were driving around in. But we needed a truck, and we needed a tractor. But these are things that my mom and my brother were not interested in financing. And so after about three-and-a-half years there and after the birth of my second daughter, who was born on the property in a teepee, same doctor-- 01:28:44.479 --> 01:28:56.796 And what is her name? 01:28:56.796 --> 01:31:31.194 Corrina. 01:31:31.194 --> 01:31:44.247 Corrina. 01:31:44.247 --> 01:33:43.333 Yeah. And so she was born on the property. And sometime shortly after that, I kind of made the plea again, like, look, we need--I think I had a tractor at that point. They'd got me a used tractor. But I said, We need a salary. I mean we have free rent, but we need, we're taking care of a ten acre orchard. We're selling the fruit for you, we're making sure that it's taken care of. And basically the people around here that I knew had told me, They should be paying you like a couple hundred bucks a month besides just giving you a place to live there. So I kind of--what's the word I'm trying to think of?--lobbied for a salary, and they weren't having it, you know? And so I was pretty frustrated with my mom and my brother at that point, and I kind of called their bluff. I said, Well look, if you guys are not willing to put into the property what it needs, then you should probably sell it because it's coming into production, and there's gonna' be a lot of stuff needed. And if you don't do what you need to do, it's just gonna' be a big loss. And so they decided to sell it. So that meant we had to find another place to live. So we had developed some friendships with some folks that we still are very close to. Well actually he's passed away, but, his wife, Lizzie, David and Lizzie, our friends, had a place up in the Sierras near Twain Harte, which is in the gold country off of Highway 49 on the Sonora Pass. And they had a thirty-acre apple orchard. They were also back-to-the-landers, right? They're a little older than us. And actually, they had been able to get the land up there where they went. And so we'd become friends with them, and so we decided, well, let's move up there near them, you know? 'Cause land is a lot cheaper than it is here. So we found a place up there to rent, to try to explore the area. And I was gonna' try to--I was really just trying to make, just starting to make some headway with my music here in California. There was a group in California called The Alternative Chorus. It was in Hollywood. It was called the Los Angeles Alternative Chorus (Los Angeles Songwriters Showcase).And it was run by a guy named Len Chandler and a guy named John Braheny. And they were both songwriters, working songwriters. And if you read Bob Dylan's book, Chronicles, which I didn't read 'til many years later, after I was no longer in touch with Len Chandler, I found out that Len Chandler was a mentor of Bob Dylan's when Bob Dylan moved to New York in the Greenwich Village scene. And he was this Black guy, who was a songwriter who rode a motorcycle and didn't take anything from anybody. He was a real outspoken progressive person. And Bob Dylan had the utmost respect for him, and he outlines it in his book, Chronicles. But anyways, Len Chandler was one of these two guys that ran this Alternative Chorus. And what they did is they, you could make an appointment with them as a songwriter and then you'd show up at this little place in Hollywood that they had behind a house, another little house behind a house, where they would do this Alternative Chorus thing. And they had a cassette recorder. And they would have you play like five or six songs just right there for them into their cassette recorder. And they'd probably do like, do this once or twice a month and have like four or five songwriters come in over a day or over two days. And then they would go through everything and pick out the top songs and contact those songwriters and say, Okay, we picked out two of your songs, and we want you to come and showcase at our showcase night at the Ash Grove on such and such a night. Well, every time I went there, they picked out two of my songs, and they were real champions for me. I'm emotional to talk about-- 01:33:43.333 --> 01:33:44.000 That's okay. Take your time. Yeah. 01:33:44.000 --> 01:58:25.524 Yeah. Because as an artist, you run up against the wall so many times. But these guys, they heard what I was doing, and they acknowledged it, and they showcased my music. It didn't get me that far., but the acknowledgement from two people that were in the business that would let you come in and showcase and make some connections. So I worked with those guys for probably three or four years. Over three or four years, they probably showcased me four or five times at different venues. And some of it led to somebody being interested in a song, a publisher being interested in a song, or something. So we had just--so right when that was happening, we moved up to Calaveras County, which was the county north of where our friends lived. And we were completely isolated up there. It was like, we didn't know anybody, and they were, our friends were fifty miles away. So it was kind of a trip to get there, and we weren't seeing them that often. I didn't have a job, so I found a place in Sonora, a bar that would hire me to play three nights a week at like 50 bucks a night. But that was like a thirty mile drive on windy roads, Highway 49. And the place was called the County Jail. I think I was actually off probation by then. I'd managed to get off probation by then. But it was kind of funny 'cause the place was called the County Jail. And so I would drive there three nights a week and play for two or three hours for 50 bucks. And that's what we were living on. The place we were renting was like a labor house, like a lumberjack labor house up in the woods. And we stayed there about six months, and it was just like nothing happening up there. And I'd just started to make some connections down here, and I just felt like, boy, what a mistake to come up here. Right around that time I wrote a song called Goldmine. And we had met--through a friend in Seattle when we lived there--we had met--Well, let's see how I explain this. We'd met these two older folks, I mean, four or five years older than us, a couple in Seattle that were kind of our grounding people there. And they had been friends with Jesse Colin Young from the Youngbloods, which was a--I don't know if you know who that was, but they were a big group in the sixties. He had that hit song, Get Together, was that big hit song for Jesse. And his brother-in-law, his wife's brother, was a really great piano player. The Youngbloods just broke up, or they were just about to break up, and he was starting another band called the Jesse Colin Young Band. And Scott Lawrence, his brother-in-law, was gonna' be the piano player. So they sent him up there 'cause he was also trying to deal with the draft. And he came up to Seattle to stay with these two older friends that we knew that were friends of Jesse's and Susie Young, to deal with the draft board in Seattle, because he had a letter from Jesse that basically said that Jesse was homosexual and that Scott was homosexual, and they had a relationship and that was gonna' get him outta' the draft. But they couldn't do it in San Francisco 'cause too many people knew who Jesse was. And they wouldn't fly in San Francisco, but in Seattle, nobody knew anybody. So they sent him up there to deal with it, to get out of the draft. And that's how we met him, 'cause he stayed there for about two or three weeks. And so when we came back down to Southern California, then the band, his band, was going. Jesse's band was going, and Scott was in the band. And they were playing in LA after we came back down here. And we kind of finagled our way backstage somehow. You know, we kept saying we knew Scott, and we were trying to get backstage. And all of a sudden, Scott walked by, we go, Hey, Scott. You know? So he brought us backstage, and we met Jesse and Susie, his sister, and so we had cultivated a relationship with them. So now we're in Wilseyville, up in Calaveras County, and I've just written this song, Goldmine. And Lauren writes a letter to Jesse Colin Young and asks him if I can come over to the Bay Area and record this song, Goldmine, in his studio, which, I was--cold feet to do that. But she said, I'm just gonna' write him. All they could say is no. Well, he said yes. So we went over there and recorded the song and then Alternative Showcase showcased that song. A couple different publishers held that song, but nobody ultimately picked it up. So we moved back down here to a little place in Oceanside. A rental place in Oceanside. And we were probably there for under a year. So I, we had a baby and a 3-year-old. Lauren decided to get her Montessori credential 'cause she'd been like a helper at the Montessori school. We still had a baby that was gonna' go to the Montessori school. So she started to get her Montessori training. And I started, was able to procure a lawnmower and an edger, a rake, and a shovel and a hoe. And I started to accumulate some gardening customers up in the LA area. The first one was my brother. And then he had, he knew somebody that needed a gardener. So that was the second client. And then Lauren's aunt lived up in that area. And so she hired me. So I had three gardening clients. So I would drive up on like a Tuesday, stay at my brother's house, next morning, do his gardening, go over to another place in town and do the gardening there. And then it would be about one. I would drive into Hollywood with a stack of reel-to-reel tapes of my songs and hit all the high rises, which are filled with publishers. I'd just go in and look at the directories and find out where all the publishers were. And then I would go to every publisher and drop off a tape. Like every week. And my tapes were like piling up at publishers 'cause nobody was listening to them. They were just getting dropped off there. So that didn't really--one guy actually decided that to hold the song, Goldmine. And they gave me like a letter of intent that they wanted to hold it and so not to show it to anybody else. And that was about three months or four months, and then they decided they weren't gonna' do it. So I have lots of those stories. You have to, it's like shots on goal, you know, you have to take shots on goal to score. So, let's see, from there--we hated that place at Oceanside. And we had our kids back in the school in Fallbrook, where they had been when we lived on my mom's property. And we found a place in Fallbrook to rent. It was an eight-acre avocado orchard with a house on it. And so we were able to parlay our way into being the managers of the orchard for the guy who owned the property in exchange for the rent of the house. So another similar kind of setup. So we lived there for four years. And during that time I started gigging. I actually, I had a job--okay, get back to my jobs again. So I had that job with the grove service. So when, after about two weeks of that, I got the job at the irrigation place. I worked there for about a year. And I left there because one of the guys that was a manager at the irrigation place heard about an opportunity and told me about it. He knew two carpenters, two local carpenters from Fallbrook, that were building a big house, just maybe six miles from here, up in the Olive Hill area between here and Fallbrook. It was a custom home they were building for the guy that owned El Molino Mills that used to make all the health food flour and all that stuff. And I can't think of his name right now. But anyways I got hired on as a carpenter's apprentice with those two guys. And they basically taught me basic carpentry and framing. It was really cool job. They were two older guys, like almost my grandfather's age, that had been carpenters around here for years and old school, you know. And I had to do all the really dirt work. But I learned a lot, that I could put into my personal toolkit. About building and construction and wood and hammers and saws and all that stuff. When that house was done, they didn't have another project, but they got me a job with a construction crew in Oceanside that was building a, it was like a, I think it was an office building. And I went to work with them as a framer for about a month. And I hated it. It was just like, 'cause it was nothing like working with these two old carpenters. These, they were all guys about my age or maybe a little older and just very construction worker kind of energy, and it just wasn't my cup of tea. And so I left there and I looked around for another job, and I got a job at the Fallbrook Enterprise, the newspaper. And I had a part-time job there as a pasting--pasting up the real estate and what do they call 'em? Like the want ads. I forget, there's another name for it. So I was doing like, maybe four pages in the newspaper every week. But it was before computers. So everything was like tape on a light board with an exacto knife. And then you would get, the letters would be generated by one computer that would just generate your copy. You'd put it through a waxer and cut it up and stick it to the grid board on a light table. You've probably seen that stuff, paste-up work like that. So I did that and that was really a, I'd done some of that stuff on my own as a kid. I was always into making posters, and I'd go to the stationary store and get the transfer type. And so I kind of had that already. And then working there, they had all the tools, all the different kind of tapes, and the exacto knife and the waxer. So I really enjoyed that job there, and while I was working there, a guy I had met in LA in auditioning to be in a band that I ended up not being in, had moved to Oceanside. And he had been at the same audition, and we'd all exchanged phone numbers. And he knew that I lived nearby. He was a bass player. So he contacted me. And we ended up forming a duo--me playing my songs and him playing bass and singing harmony. And we worked our way down to an open stage in Encinitas at a club called The Stingaree, which, which was owned by Jack Tempchin. I don't know if you know who he is, but he's the, he goes by Jack Tempchin, Eagles songwriter--Jack Tempchin. He wrote Peaceful Easy Feeling, and Already Gone. He wrote Slow Dancing for Johnny Rivers. He's written multiple hit songs. And he lives in Encinitas, just a regular guy, great songwriter. And I had gotten onto him when we first moved to this area, and we'd become friends. 'Cause he had an open stage that he ran at like a music store over there. It was called The Blue Ridge Music Store in Encinitas. It's not there anymore. So I would go play the open mic there that he ran one day a week, or maybe it was a couple times a month. And then he had some success 'cause the Eagles became really big and his songs were like, their hits. And so he was able to buy a nice house in Encinitas. And he bought a bar, and he thought, Well, I'm gonna' buy a bar and make it into a music club. So he made this club called The Stingaree. It was named after a song he'd written called The Stingaree and which was a song about a big party in San Diego that he'd gone to. And so they had an open stage there one night a week. Before the band would play, they would have an open stage. And so we went down there one night and played the open stage. And the band that was playing that night after us was Rosie Flores and the Screamers, Rosie and the Screamers. And I don't know, you probably know who Rosie Flores is, but she's actually being inducted into the San Diego Music Hall of Fame in September. She's my age, but, and she doesn't live here anymore. But she was, at that time, she was like really well known in the San Diego scene here. And she'd had an all-girl band. And now she had this band called The Screamers. And they were packing the place every time they played there. And so we came in one of the nights and played on the open stage, and she heard me play that song, Goldmine. And she came up to me after that. And she wanted to, she wanted that song, you know, she wanted to play it. So I gave her the song, taught her the song, and then we kind of hit it off. And we started playing together. And we ended up--my friend ended up going to Saudi Arabia to work for some oil company or something, the bass player guy. And so Rosie and I ended up being a duo 'cause her band had broken up. And so it was Rosie Flores and at that time, I was using a different name. I've had like three last names. My born last name, and then a name I took on sort of through the whole draft thing, and then my name now, which has been my name for many, many years, which is a Spanish translation of my middle name. So anyways, the two of us had this duo, and we were playing five nights a week, plus I had the job at the newspaper. So I was making okay money, enough to keep us in groceries and pay our rent. Well, we didn't really have any rent, but pay our expenses, our utilities, and all that kind of stuff. And it was all going along pretty good. And then Rosie decided she was gonna' move to LA because San Diego--there was just like, it's like being a big fish in a small bowl. You couldn't really do anything past what we were doing. We were very popular. We were playing in two different clubs four or five nights a week. But she was the draw. I was the songwriter guy, and she was the singer, so she was singing some of my songs. I was singing some of my songs. And then we were doing a bunch of covers that she was singing, and I was singing harmony. So she decided she was gonna' move to LA, and that kind of left me on my own again. So I didn't have a sound system. We were using her sound system. So at that point, a friend of mine from school named Tad Williams had come into some money. His dad had died and had left him and his brother some money, and he told me that he wanted to be my sponsor. So he was like my first patron, and he bought me a sound system. And he basically--I still had the part-time job at the newspaper--but he made sure that our bills were paid for the next couple years. He'd come out and check on us and see how we were doing. And if we were a little short, he'd give me a thousand dollars, to last me in the next couple months. And that got us through, so I could continue to play music. So I was hauling my sound system to a club over in Cardiff three or four nights a week. And it was just basically playing in a bar for four hours a night. Pretty rough gig. So I did that. Then he got killed in a plane crash. And so that was over. That was about the time that--there was a paper in Oceanside called the Blade Tribune at that time. And it was--I forget--it was owned by a company that owned a bunch of newspapers. And the guy who owned the newspapers was the father of this guy, who became a fan of Rosie and myself. He would come to a lot of our shows. So when she left town, he continued to support me, coming to the shows and stuff like that. And he was the music editor at the Blade Tribune. This is a little bit outta' chronology, but this is about 1976-77 is when, she probably left town in '77. And so I was doing these solo gigs at a few different clubs here and there. And just trying to kinda' keep my head above water. And Rick Danko, the band, you know the band? They had just done that movie, The Last Waltz, and the band had broken up, that was like the end of the band. And then Rick Danko, the bass player from the band, started a band of his own, just called the Rick Danko Band. And this guy, who was the Blade Tribune editor, called me up one day and said, Hey, Rick Danko is gonna' be playing at the La Paloma Theater. He is doing two shows on this one night in like an early show and a late show, and they don't have an opening act. Here's the promoter's name. You should go over there and talk to 'em. So I went over there, and I got the gig. So that was my first opening for a national touring act. I opened two shows for Rick Danko at the La Poloma Theater. And Rick Danko and his brother, Terry, came out during my set for both shows, up in the balcony and listened to my set and really liked my songs. And so Rick and I became friends. And he had me open a couple more shows for him when he was in California. 'Cause he would travel all over the place, and he lived in Malibu at the time. So I kind of became a sometime opening act for Rick Danko, who would be traveling with all kinds of people. One of the times in his band was Paul Butterfield--was in his band, or different really high-visibility players that he would pick up along the way and they--so I got to meet a lot of people through Rick. Like I met Paul Butterfield. I actually went to Rick Danko's birthday party, his 40th birthday party, in Malibu. And I met Richard Manuel and his wife from the band and Garth Hudson from the band. They were both at his party. And then I met Joe Cocker through him. I met Bobby Norwood through him. I mean, just a number of people that he would be interacting with me, would just introduce me as his friend and songwriter friend of his. And because I opened that show for him, I got the idea like, Wow, there's all these national shows coming into town. There's like three different promoters promoting in different venues. And so those became my targets. Instead of playing in bars for four hours with cigarette smoke and nobody listening, I started--every time I'd hear about a concert, I'd just keep my eyes on the ads and as soon as someone would be announced, I'd go hit up the promoter. I had a review from the Rick Danko show that was written by my friend, where I had a really good mention, and I parlayed that to a show with Jesse Colin Young when he came to town, because I knew him already. And then that--I ended up getting a show with John Lee Hooker from that, Country Joe and the Fish from that, Emmylou Harris. I mean, the list is like really long, you know? And I did that for the next maybe few years. At one point I did have another job after the Jazzercise job (Joel worked as the audio person on video tapes of original Jazzercise classes created by Judi Missett.), with Community Ed (education). A friend of ours, was working in the Community Ed system, and she said, I think that you could teach on a limited credential--it's like a lifetime limited credential based on experience--in the Community Ed department for senior citizens that are in like rest homes and convalescent hospitals. And so for about a year, I sang songs and played movies that I would rent at the library for senior citizens in rest homes. I would interface with the activities directors at these various homes. And through the Community Ed system, I would go and do a two-hour class for their activities of these homes. It was one of the hardest jobs I ever had. But it served me really well because it was a really good hourly rate. And I could do it like two days, three days a week without having to spend all my time at work while I was trying to do music and art. 01:58:25.524 --> 01:58:28.534 So the classes were music you were teaching? 01:58:28.534 --> 02:05:50.564 Well, they wanted--initially she wanted me to do like an exercise class, just a stretching class with these older folks that are like my age now. But I didn't have any experience in that. So I said, what I could do is I could--I found out that there were a lot of films available, 16-millimeter films back then, through the library system that I could check out. And most of the centers had projectors. So I would go in, I would show them a half-an-hour film on just an interesting subject. I mean, it might be Will Rogers' California Ranch or it might be a documentary about an old guy that lives in Oregon that builds log cabins. I mean, just anything interesting I could find. And then the rest of the class would be sing-alongs. I'd performed some songs and do some sing-alongs. And some of those songs were Woody Guthrie songs. So I was pulling that back into my repertoire, Also, a good place to end, too, is that at one point, because I knew a lot of Woody Guthrie songs, at one point in my career when my kids were young, I decided to look into Woody Guthrie with more depth, because I realized how many people he had influenced and particularly Bob Dylan. And I thought, Well, rather than just listen to Bob Dylan, I want to go back a step and see what it was he found when he was influenced by Woody Guthrie. And so I kind of took a journey to learn more about Woody Guthrie. Even though I had played some of his songs from the time I was a teenager, I just decided to dig in deeper. And the first thing I found out was that there wasn't much Woody Guthrie around. Like, his records were all out of print. You know, you'd be, if you could find a copy of a Bound for Glory, his bestselling novel, you were lucky 'cause those were out of print. But I did manage to find a copy, and I found a store up in Santa Monica that sold a lot of children's records that had the Songs to Grow On that were written by Woody and his wife for their kids. And so my kids were brought up on those songs in the cassette player in the car. And those were some of the first songs I learned. I also found a copy of a tape with Woody and Cisco Houston singing cowboy songs. So I started to incorporate some of the songs into my own set. And when I got this job with Community Ed, I developed that up further. So I made lyric sheets so I could really learn these songs, and the Woody Guthrie songs were the ones that really stuck out as the best songs to me. And so at one point, I thought, Well, I could actually put together a one-man show about Woody Guthrie, and maybe I could even get an endorsement or be sanctioned by the Woody Guthrie, Woody Guthrie's management, which he still had a manager even though he was dead--this guy, Harold Leventhal, I knew from the books that I had found--a couple of books--that he was the guy, who was kind of in charge of Woody Guthrie's estate at that point. And so I looked up his office. I found a number for his office in New York City, and I called his office, and Harold Leventhal answered the phone, And I explained to him that I was a songwriter in California and that I had learned a number of these Woody Guthrie songs and that I had been listening to the Library of Congress tapes, which were recorded by Alan Lomax. It's about four hours of Woody, similar to what we're doing here. Only Woody would tell his story and then play a song that he'd written that kind of went with it. And those tapes are in the Library of Congress, and I--that you can get them on cassette tapes. So I've been listening to those, the interviews and the songs, and I thought, Well, I could put together a real show. So I called Harold Leventhal and kind of broached the idea with him, and he completely just shut me down. He said, No, you can't do that. You can't even play any Woody Guthrie songs, he says, because, all those songs are protected, and they're being held for a production that we're doing about Woody Guthrie, and you cannot use them under any circumstances. Goodbye. Bang, you know. So I was like, Wow, you know, I was really like, taken aback. So I thought, Well, screw that, I'm gonna' play these songs anyways. So I played them in, for my classes, I didn't develop up the show. I didn't go there. But I played these songs in my classes and I honed up these Woody Guthrie songs, so they were sounding really good. Ironically--and this would be a good stop point--many years later, when I was playing at the Woody Guthrie Festivals on a regular basis, when Nora Guthrie gave me the first Woody Guthrie song to write music to, it was a song called Dance a Little Longer. And we recorded it, and I was on my way home from the Woody Guthrie Festival in Oklahoma. I don't know which year it was, but it was the year after I had, it was probably around 2000 (2003). Yeah, 'cause that's when that first record came out that had that on it. So I was on my way home, and my cell phone rings, and it's a New York City number. But I decided to answer, and I answered it, and it was Harold Leventhal calling me up. Now he doesn't know I was the guy, who called him many years earlier, but now I'm the guy who finished this Woody Guthrie song, and he really liked it, So he called me up to tell me how much he liked it and to thank me profusely for helping to carry on Woody Guthrie's legacy. So the irony of that really hit me. And, of course, I never told him about the earlier connection. But that sort of closed the endorsement, finished the endorsement from Woody Guthrie Archives and Woody Guthrie Publications and that kind of thing. So where we're leaving off is I've just worked at, with the Community Ed, and I tried to do the Woody Guthrie thing. Harold shut me down. And now I'm about to get a job at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. 02:05:50.564 --> 02:05:56.157 Okay. Thank you so much. As you have alluded to, this is session one-- 02:05:56.157 --> 02:05:57.052 Yes. 02:05:57.052 --> 02:06:01.814 --of Joel's oral history, and we'll be back together for the next interview. 02:06:01.814 --> 02:06:04.314 I look forward to it. NOTE TRANSCRIPTION END ]]> https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en video Property rights reside with the university. Copyrights are retained by the creators of the records and their heirs.&#13 ; &#13 ; This resource is licensed for noncommercial educational use using CC NC-BY 4.0. Please contact Special Collections at archives csusm.edu if you need reproductions made.&#13 ; &#13 ; Please see the related “Preferred Citation note” for language on citing materials from this collection.&#13 ; Permission to examine Library materials is not authorization to publish or to reproduce the examined material in whole, or in part. Persons wishing to quote, publish, perform, reproduce, or otherwise make use of an item in the library’s collections must assume all responsibility for identifying and satisfying any claimants of the copyright holder.&#13 ; The researcher assumes full responsibility for use of the material and agrees to hold harmless the University Library, and California State University, against all claims, demands, costs, and expenses incurred by copyright infringement or any other legal or regulatory cause of action arising from the use of the library's materials.&#13 ; In assuming full responsibility for use of the material, the researcher also understands that the materials they examine may contain Social Security numbers, other personal identifiers, and/or sensitive material on potentially living and identifiable individuals (e.g., medical, evaluative, or personally invasive&#13 ; 30&#13 ; information). The researcher agrees not to record, reproduce, or disclose any Social Security number or other information of a highly personal nature that may be found. 0 https://archivesoralhistories.csusm.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=RafaelJoel_FabbiJennifer_2025-08-20.xml RafaelJoel_FabbiJennifer_2025-08-20.xml https://archivesearch.csusm.edu/repositories/3/resources/19 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rafael, Joel. Interview August 20th, 2025. Description An account of the resource Joel Rafael is an American singer-songwriter and folk musician from San Diego County, California. Joel has been making music with his band and solo for over fifty years. He is well known for his writing and performance in the style of Woody Guthrie. In this part one interview, Rafael discusses his early musical influences, his participation in the 1960s counterculture movement, and the beginnings of his success in the music industry. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SC027-086 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025-08-20 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Joel Rafael Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Fabbi Subject The topic of the resource Songwriters -- United States Folk music Counterculture -- United States Guthrie, Woody, 1912-1967 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Escondido (Calif.) Chicago (Ill.) Covina (Calif.) West Covina (Calif.) Portland (Oregon) Seattle (Wash.) Fallbrook (Calif.) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available California State University San Marcos University Library Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In copyright</a> Rights Holder A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. Joel Rafael License A legal document giving official permission to do something with the resource. <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource moving image Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. community history Art and artists Community history