Carceral Geography in El Paso, TX: Creating Sound Walks to Experience Disappeared Histories

2021-2022 UTEP/EPCC Mellon Humanities Collaborative Faculty Fellowship

Sound walk events, research guides, community writing workshops with The Tumblewords Project, poet interviews in Jacket2 and blog reflections created in collaboration with EPCC undergraduate research fellows Tatiana Rodriguez, Rebekah Patnode and Saul Fontes, and UTEP Public History Internship Masters student Adam Heywood.

EPCC Library Research Guide: Carceral Geography in El Paso, TX

This EPCC Library Guide is designed as a research tool that can be used in connection with the Soundwalks. We encourage student researchers to experience the Soundwalk as an embodied opportunity to generate research questions, a starting point for investigation. While walking the route... What did you begin to wonder? What points of confusion sparked questions? Where did you notice your attention and curiosity drawn towards?

Student Blog

Tatiana Rodriguez, A Conversation with Donna Snyder: An Advocate and Speaker for the Unseen (April 2022)
Honora Spicer, Architectures of Disappearance: In Conversation with Contemporary Poets (April 2022)
Adam Heywood, Uncovering Historical Silences Towards a Cageless Future (March 2022)
Tatiana Rodriguez, Learning About Silenced Histories Through Spoken Word Poetry (November 2021)
Rebekah Patnode, Orienting to Carceral Geography in Summer 2021 (October 2021)

Reflections on Three Public Soundwalks in April 2022

Our project, ‘Carceral Geography in El Paso, TX: Soundwalks to Experience Disappeared Histories’ culminated with three in-person public humanities events. Having recently completed these walking routes, which are accompanied by recorded audio tracks and historical narratives, we invited interested learners from EPCC, UTEP and the wider community to join us for initial walks. These walks allowed us to learn from participants and envision uses and implications for this public humanities resource. 

Airport Soundwalk 

Written by Honora Spicer, EPCC Faculty Fellow

We gathered for the Airport Soundwalk on Boeing Ave. outside of the United States Post Office on a cloudy Saturday morning, before the heat or noise of the day broke through. We were a group of eight, joined by an EPCC History student, a visitor to El Paso from Israel, and a poet with her daughter. We opened by sharing about our existing relationships to the site of the soundwalk, which is a circuit around the Post Office, the ICE Detention Center, and the NASA Forward Operating Location. We had arrived to drop off packages, take the GRE, visit the detention center, come and go from Fort Bliss, go on a morning run. Overall, the sentiment at the start of the walk was: Why would anyone want to make something about this place? 

This sense of non-importance, veneer of normalcy verging on non-place, the sensation of in-between, was precisely what became a point of intrigue as we walked. Participants asked: What is and is not monumental about this place? What makes this place unique or emblematic? Walkers encountered initial prompts for orientation to the natural environment, and reflected on the way in which these were grounding, even while the poetic quality of the audio tracks gave an impressionistic sense of unease. In general, walkers expected a more didactic or objective educational approach, and rather found an artistic tack based on embodied sensations and drawing on readings from community writing workshops engaging with this space throughout the past year. Participants described the sonic quality of the walk as rough, local, intimate, associative, and pondering. 

This public walk allowed me to understand the soundwalk as an opening experience within a longer educational process. The soundwalk serves as a beginning point for investigation: it offers a methodology for developing research questions which arise from embodied sensations in place. As the walk continued, participants asked with greater urgency and confusion one of the questions that propelled this site to be part of our project on carceral geography: What are these places (ICE detention, NASA, the Post Office) doing beside each other? What is the connection between them? Seen as a starting point, the soundwalk can be used in conjunction with the EPCC Library Guide that we have developed with EPCC Librarian Lorely Ambriz, which allows students in diverse interdisciplinary classes to pursue research on questions that they are propelled towards through the tactile experience of walking and listening in place. 

The reflections that we heard from participants were deeply engaged and thoughtful. We had conversations about the relationship between these federal institutions and the local government in El Paso, the flow of capital through private contracts in relation to this geographic space, and how we could attune to what is alive within a space whose multi-species life has been constrained. Through walking, listening, and pausing to converse, I came to notice how we had paid great attention to the poetics of listening in developing the piece, and not as much to the poetics of movement. Seeing participants move through this space which is so vast, formidable, looming, loud and silent at once, gave the sensation at times of performance on a stage. Walking together inspired ideas for further collaborations with dancers and movement artists in the space. 

Duranguito Sound Walk 

Written by Tatiana Rodriguez, EPCC Undergraduate Research Fellow

On April 19, Faculty Fellow Honora Spicer, Master’s student Adam Heywood, student fellow Saul Fontes and I met with two participants for a public presentation of the Duranguito Sound Walk and Historical Narrative. The Soundwalk consists of four tracks: two Saul Fontes created and two I created. I had participated in a draft walk of this route a week prior with the fellowship to go over when I would like to ask the attendees questions or present creative prompts at specific sites along the way. The participants who we were honored to have join us were both long-time El Paso residents who had been involved in different ways with advocating for historic preservation and studying Indigenous histories of the neighborhood. Both listeners were insightful and helpful with the feedback they offered. I appreciated the ideas they gave for both of my tracks. 

After listening to the first track I developed, one participant said she thought it was important that I read an excerpt from the Historical Narrative regarding how Mescalero Apache peace camps once stood in the land that is now Duranguito. She detailed how the geography and agriculture of El Paso have undergone drastic changes. The city was once a river valley that boasted what was considered the best vineyards. She continued to describe how she studied the trees while listening to my first audio recording because they gave a glimpse of the layered geographies of Duranguito. Another participant felt each track was powerful and informative about the neighborhood's history. She stated that they were concise but still gave plenty of information to listeners who may not be familiar with the space. We all agreed that I could include clips from some of the UTEP oral histories regarding past/present residents. These suggestions for revisions allowed me to think differently of my Soundwalk since it can provide a platform to include the various voices that are still present in Duranguito. 

“Ending on Hope”: Downtown Soundwalk

Written by Adam Heywood, UTEP Public History Intern and History Master’s Candidate 

On a warm spring evening, a diverse group of nineteen students, educators, poets, scholars, and activists from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), El Paso Community College (EPCC), and other interested walkers gathered at San Jacinto Plaza in downtown El Paso, Texas. A large portion of participants joined us through Dr. Convertino’s Sociocultural Foundations of Education course in the Teaching, Learning and Culture Ph.D. program at UTEP, with an interest in embodied approaches to education. We were also joined by students in Professor Fertman’s undergraduate Women and Gender Studies course at UTEP.

The soundwalk started at the Los Lagartos statue and ended at the Chinche Al Agua and Sacred Heart Church Mural on Father Rahm Avenue in El Segundo Barrio. The themes of settler-colonization, criminalization, segregation, and decolonization brought most of the participants together on this particular evening for what became an engaging and emotional night filled with heartfelt reflections and critical analysis of the carceral environments encompassing the downtown area. The soundwalk began with introductions from everybody and some quick notes on the background and structure of the walk itself. As each member of the group put on their headphones and pressed play on track one, the plaza soon filled with gazing eyes and moving footsteps. 

The comments from San Jacinto Plaza and its layered history of settler-colonization sparked reactions from one of the participants, “I can visualize how it looked back then.” Sounds emanating from the audio clip built upon each other, producing an environment filled with disappeared moments and landscapes like rushing water, steam locomotives, protests, and reminders of “What would it sound like if there were no cars.” The criminalization zone followed and included the United States Federal Building and the El Paso County Courthouse’s employee parking garage. Surrounded by these two structures, the detention center, the downtown El Paso Police Station, multiple police cars and modes of surveillance, the emotional and traumatizing effects of this landscape became apparent. Participants shared personal connections to the spaces, and compared the hidden carceral trauma inside the detention center with the everyday business inside the glass-ordained county courthouse. Participants compared the overlapping and overwhelming voices and sounds on the audio clip with the chaos immigrants experienced at the border and in detention centers, not understanding the language and being pushed through a confusing and irrational system. 

The walk continued into the segregation zone as the group crossed Paisano Drive into El Segundo Barrio. Physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion began to set in, as the emotional journey through historical layers of oppression and trauma started to show on everyone’s face as the sun set. One participant expressed concern with the historical uses of redlining in the area and poignantly observed the covert efforts today to maintain these same historical injustices. The night ended at the two murals on Father Rahm Avenue that represented the resistance, hope, and decolonizing efforts of a community that El Paso politicians and elites wanted to forget. As the weary group gathered for a final reflection, each person chose a word to encapsulate the soundwalk: interesting, privileged, layered, beautiful, silenced, home, hope.