Witnessing In the Americas: A Conversation with Gabriela Martínez

Gabriela Martínez filming

Whether she is documenting the deadly effects of open-fire cooking and heating on children and women in Mayan homes in highland Guatemala, recording the history of indigenous women in Mexico, or writing about the geographical expansion and institutional growth of the Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica, UO associate professor and documentary filmmaker Gabriela Martínez (SOJC) carries out her work with a mixture of heart, intelligence, and skill that brings life and gravitas to the product. Co-creator with Lynn Stephen (Anthropology) in 2010-11 of the Latino Roots class, which culminated in the making of eighteen oral history documentaries by UO students, Martínez spent her 2011-12 sabbatical year in part by documenting historical atrocities from Guatemala’s civil war and conducting research for a book about the political economy of collective memory. She is the newly appointed associate director of CSWS.

Q: You grew up in Peru. What brought you to this country?

GM: The first time I came to the United States was for a year in 1986, and after that time for a few years I was in between Peru and the United States. However, I immigrated for good in 1994. My main goal for coming to the U.S. was to study filmmaking or another media-related career, which I did in Broadcast Electronic and Communication Arts at San Francisco State University.

In 1987 I formed a small film company in Cuzco, Peru, with a friend from New York. We produced several documentaries for the Peruvian market and for academic distribution in the United States. Once I moved for good to the U.S. we dissolved our business partnership, and I went back to school to earn my degree in media.

Q: Had you earned a degree in Peru previous to that?

GM: I went to the local public university in my hometown of Cuzco. Because there were no media or filmmaking careers at this university, I opted for cultural anthropology, which is something that has always interested me as well. This was in the mid- to late 1980s, however, when Peru was waging an internal war between the state and the Maoist group known as Shining Path. As a consequence of this political upheaval, my university, like most public universities in Peru at that time, was in constant turmoil, with ongoing strikes, internal power struggles between students’ political parties, and so on. We didn’t have normal classes or regular semesters due to the sociopolitical turmoil. So, I decided to focus on my work as a filmmaker instead of trying to earn a degree in anthropology. However, my exposure to and studies in anthropology have influenced much of my documentary film work. Furthermore, my initial body of work is fairly anthropological, what some may consider to be visual ethnography. 

Q. You come from a middle-class family in a culture with rich traditions, disparate economic situations, and great political turmoil. What are some of the ways in which your upbringing and cultural background have influenced your work and choices of projects? 

GM: Because I grew up surrounded by culturally rich indigenous and mestizo populations, which at the same time were oppressed and marginalized, I have always gravitated toward topics dealing with these populations, particularly the indigenous. I went to high school where most students were peasants, or the children of indigenous people, in a small town outside the city of Cuzco. Most of my classmates were the first in their families to reach high school level. I made strong friendships with many of them, and my experience at that high school has affected much of what I have done with my career. 

The internal war suffered by Peru is another factor that has influenced my work as a documentary maker. The war began when I was fifteen years old, and it lasted close to twenty years. My interest in human rights, social justice, and historical memory—among other related topics—comes in part from having experienced such social conflict.

My background is that of the Peruvian middle class, which until the late 1970s or early 1980s enjoyed certain stability. As the country entered into a big recession, economic hyperinflation, and political turmoil, the middle class sort of shrank. In order to hold on to a certain quality of life, most middle class professionals needed to have two, or sometimes three, jobs. There were professional people, especially in Lima, the capital of the country, who earned extra money using their cars as taxis while driving from home to work or on their way back to home. Those were difficult years for most of the population.

If a country is either internally or externally at war for a long period of time, and the economic situation reaches a deep recession, inevitably the gap between the rich and the poor may widen; and the middle class suffers, usually falling down the ladder. 

Q: Many of your projects have involved collaborations and partnerships. Who have been some of your mentors?

GM: I have various mentors who have been present at different moments in my life. My Peruvian mentor is the anthropologist Jorge Flores Ochoa who was my professor when I attended the university in Cuzco. Later we became good friends, and sometimes we worked together. 

At San Francisco State University my mentor was professor Betsy Blosser, with whom I developed an international community media service program. This program takes students to serve grassroots organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in developing countries. The students produce with and for these organizations public service announcements, documentaries, and other audio-visual materials that the organizations deem necessary for their work. After I left, the program continued. Professor Blosser enlisted other graduate students who came after me, and the program was able to continue working with a wide variety of organizations in about ten countries, including Peru, India, Thailand, Guatemala, Brazil, and El Salvador, among others. It is wonderful to see that the little seed I planted with Professor Blosser at San Francisco State has grown.

Here at UO, my two main mentors are my great colleagues Leslie Steeves and Janet Wasko, both in the School of Journalism and Communication. I also have worked closely with Lynn Stephen (anthropology), and to some extent I see her as a mentor as well. I have learned a great deal from all of them. Outside my school (SOJC), the work with Lynn Stephen has been a great collaboration. We have taught each other about our areas of expertise and our fields. I am generally enthusiastic about collaborating with colleagues in other disciplines. I think doing so helps me stay current and engaged in what goes on in various parts of the academic world and the world at large as many colleagues in the different disciplines work internationally. 

Q: You have developed long-term projects that you keep working at, that have a big scope to them and can be replicated in some way by somebody else—or used as a model. Does this emerge out of your teaching philosophy?

GM: I find it important to work on ideas and projects that can be useful to others and help to encourage positive transformation of our societies. I tend to see how one little thing I do here, on this corner, may have an impact on the macro level, or on another corner. But I may not even imagine this at the moment of my doing. 

I like engaging in projects that at an individual level will inform people, and may help transform ways of thinking or certain attitudes. Ultimately, at the macro level, I would like to influence policy for improving our societies. Of course none of these are doable overnight, or in one academic year, or with one project. One must think in the long term, and see how different projects may help accomplish these goals, if not at once, then over time. The important thing is to persevere. Even if I’m no longer involved with a particular project, my hope is that others will continue the work or replicate the model to benefit their own communities.

Many times one may develop something that is not 100 percent replicable under a particular context but perhaps can be adapted, and it may work just fine for the goals of those wanting to use what you originally developed. One needs to be aware that not all models are, or should be, exactly replicable; and that’s fine too.

Q: Would you highlight some of your projects—the stove project in Guatemala, the Latino Roots Project? 

GM: I began producing documentaries in the late 1980s. My early work was focused primarily in the southern Andes, specifically in Peru. I produced several ethnographic documentaries addressing the daily life, rituals, and worldview of Andean peoples. Later on, I started working in other areas of the Americas such as Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States. 

In 2006, I produced and directed Respire Guatemala (Breathe Guatemala), which is based on a study about indoor air pollution in the highlands of Guatemala. The documentary was done in collaboration with a team of scientists led by Dr. Kirk Smith from the Environmental Studies Program in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Currently I’m producing another documentary about Guatemala. This work focuses on the story of the Archivo Histórico de la Policia Nacional de Guatemala or AHPN (Historical Archive of the National Police of Guatemala). This is an important archive because it holds a wealth of information spanning the late nineteenth century up to 1997, including millions of documents from the internal war that took place between 1960 and 1996. My documentary work is part of a broader project in which scholars from various disciplines are interested in shedding light over contemporary efforts to bring justice, and hopefully, national reconciliation, to a nation that has suffered for so long. 

Other colleagues at our university working on this topic are Dr. Carlos Aguirre from the Department of History and Dr. Stephanie Wood from the Wired Humanities Projects at Knight Library. The Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) and UO Libraries have generously sponsored a couple of trips for the production of this documentary. Other support has come from the Wired Humanities Projects, Office of International Affairs, The Americas in a Globalized World Initiative, School of Journalism and Communication, and Latin American Studies Program.

The Latino Roots Project started in 2009 when Dr. Lynn Stephen and I were invited to develop a section on Latinos for a museum exhibit. This exhibit was to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the State of Oregon at the Lane County Historical Society and Museum. As part of the exhibit I produced Latino Roots in Lane County, a documentary based on oral histories. We also produced a booklet with some of the oral histories and pictures from the participant families who shared their life histories with us. Because the exhibit, the documentary, and the booklet generated a great deal of interest in the community and at the university, Lynn and I created a sequence course, “Latino Roots I and II,” which was offered winter and spring terms of 2011. The course sequence will be offered again this coming academic year, in winter and spring terms 2013. In this course students collect oral histories by partnering up with people from the Latino community, and then they produce short documentaries of eight to ten minutes based on the oral histories. So far we have a digital repository with eighteen stories, which are streaming on the Web <http://latinoroots.uoregon.edu/> and are also available through the UO Libraries Special Collections and University Archives. 

Q: Do you have something of a personal mission you want to accomplish?

GM: I don’t have a personal mission in the strict sense of the word, but I’m fully aware of the power of media. I’m invested in using my media skills first and foremost to fulfill the right that citizens have to be well informed. I believe that in this time and age we all should be exposed to a wide variety of voices, images, and information. This is what drives my work.

I’m interested in bringing to the forefront untold stories, that is, stories that are not so well known in mainstream society. I seek out stories that may be marginalized due to their lack of commercial appeal, or because the topic may be too controversial or hard to sell due to the nature of the story. It is important that people get exposed to other realities even if they are harsh, different, or controversial. 

Q: What are some of the key factors in your decision to take the associate director position at CSWS?

GM: I am honored to take the associate directorship at CSWS. I have been involved with CSWS since I was an assistant professor, first as a member of the Americás Research Interest Group, and later as a member of the CSWS Executive Committee, on which I served for two consecutive terms. CSWS is a unique center where faculty from a wide variety of disciplines come together to share research interests concerning women and gender. 

One of the most attractive things about this center for me is the way it serves as a stimulating space where one can learn from colleagues. I have been in various meetings where I learned different aspects about women and gender issues related to literature, philosophy, geography and other fields. I appreciate interdisciplinary work, and I find CSWS to be an ideal place for engaging in interdisciplinary research.

I believe that in an academic setting, media should be at the service of different disciplines. Media should bring to the core the various voices and diverse ways of seeing and interpreting the world that we study. CSWS is a place that will give me the opportunity to share more with colleagues from across campus as well as the chance to deepen my understanding of how research centers work internally and externally. I hope that my contribution during my time as associate director will further the already excellent work CSWS has been doing for nearly forty years. 

—Annual Review editor Alice Evans spoke with Gabriela Martínez in June 2012.

Author
Alice Evans
Publication type
Annual Review
Publication Year
2012