In 1984, community leaders and local priests became
involved in reforming Chicago schools.
“While UNO's scope and audience has expanded over
time, our mission has remained the same. 
Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, director of the U.S. Latino & Latina WWII Oral History Project and associate professor of journalism at UT, indexes a book for the oral history project.
Even though some Mexican-American soldiers felt they were a part of a brotherhood while serving in World War II, they faced civil unrest when they came back to the U.S., according to a new museum exhibit directed by UT faculty.
Ann Zundel thinks family history programs can work miracles in the lives of fractured families. She sees it nearly every day: tough men moved to tears by their discoveries of ancestors who overcame incredible hardships to survive. Men who barely have a place in their present families who find a sense of self from the past. Men who use their newfound knowledge of that past to build a bridge to the future with their own children.
Zundel is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and was working as a volunteer at the Mesa Regional Family History Center in Mesa, Arizona, when she fielded an unusual request.
“My husband was serving in the prison ministries in Florence, teaching a class, and he happened to mention that I was involved in family history,” says Zundel. “The inmates in his class were very taken by that and asked him, rather timidly, if I would consider teaching a class on family history in the prison.”
Ann Zundel said no. The thought of getting involved with the prison terrified her. Then, the more she thought about it, the more she got up the nerve to give it a try. Now, after helping hundreds of inmates research their family histories, Zundel is trying to get an official family history program established in the Arizona State Prison at Florence. It’s a bit of an uphill battle, says Zundel, because prison officials are leery of new programs. And rightfully so. There’s a lot involved in setting up something like this in a prison. It’s not just about finding space and getting donations of equipment and reference materials. There’s also the very real issue of security and a host of societal issues regarding the role and accessibility of educational and rehabilitative activities in the lives of prisoners.
In spite of the difficulties Zundel has encountered, she persists because she is convinced that giving inmates access to genealogical research can bring families of the incarcerated together in a way that is unique and very powerful.
Those who work to help children maintain ties with their incarcerated parents would agree. Ann Adalist-Estrin is director of the National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerate (NRCCFI). She hasn’t studied family history programs specifically—mainly because they’re so rare—but she has learned a lot from 30 years of working with children of the incarcerated.
“One thing I hear from kids I work with is that there are many feelings generated by having a parent in prison, and one of them is a feeling of being disconnected from their past,” says Adalist-Estrin. “They also get a feeling that they are defined by their father’s or mother’s incarceration. Knowing more about their family history can give them a much fuller context for who they are.”
One barrier Adalist-Estrin sees is the idea among some groups that children with incarcerated parents should not have contact with that parent, the idea being that a bad citizen can’t be a good parent. But, she points out, children love and want to be involved with their parents regardless of what negative choices that parent may have made. The solution is not separation, but programs that build family ties.
Research done by the Pittsburgh Child Guidance Foundation bears this out. The foundation conducted a two-year study as the initial phase of a six-year initiative to mobilize community support for children of prisoners. What they discovered, says executive director Claire Walker, is that there are many obstacles standing in the way of communication between children and their incarcerated parents.
“What I like about the idea of genealogical research is that this is a way of communicating the real bonds that tie generations together,” says Walker. “Everyone brings something into this. You become, as the parent, the vessel of transmission to the child’s past.”
Greg Sampson, who asked that his real name not be used to protect his family’s privacy, is a living example of the potential of prison genealogical research programs. Sampson was an inmate in Florence prison, serving a three-year sentence for a parole violation, when “Sister” Zundel, as he calls her, came to his ward to introduce a family history class. He became fascinated with the idea of building a family tree.
“I had a lot of spare time, so I began contacting my family members and asking them what they knew about our past,” says Sampson. “To my great surprise, these contacts and my research went far beyond just helping me establish a consensus about our ancestors. Having this project helped me restore relationships that I had lost with these family members due to my incarceration and gave me something to talk about with them besides my incarceration.”
By the time he was released, Sampson was so taken with his research that he relocated to Utah to be closer to the resources offered there by the LDS Church. Sampson is now a changed man, truly contrite, and a productive member of society. He was able to start a successful business, and he continues with his genealogical research. He credits that research with knitting back together the family ties that had unraveled because of the bad decisions he made in the past. His work researching his family’s history not only brought him back together with his extended family—it helped his children see him in a new light.
“There’s a family spirit that wasn’t there previously,” says Sampson. “We realized that we can learn lessons from the past, and we can overcome adversity and make positive changes and move on from what we are to what we have the potential to be. This has given our lives meaning and given us a sense of identity.”
Kelly Burgess is a Pennsylvania-based freelance writer.
http://www.ancestrymagazine.com/2008/07/features/incarcerated-trees/
As
a teenager, long before Enriqueta Vasquez became a writer and
activist, she wrote her first letter to complain against the
injustice she saw around her while growing up in the Southwest. Why
was she, a Mexican American, not allowed to eat in local
restaurants, while her brothers were fighting to preserve their
country's principles of freedom and democracy? Why were Mexican
Americans good enough to fight and die for their country but not
good enough to be treated as equals at home? And so began Enriqueta
Vasquez's life-long fight for justice. Highlighting the involvement
of women in the Chicano Movement, this anthology combines for the
first time in one volume the columns written by Enriqueta Vasquez
from 1968-1972 for the path-breaking Chicano newspaper, El Grito del
Norte. Enriqueta Vasquez's columns written during the peak of the
civil rights movement provided a platform for her fierce but hopeful
voice of protest. In her column, entitled Despierten Hermanos!
[Awaken, Brothers and Sisters!], she used both anger and humor in
her efforts to stir her fellow Chicanos to action. Drawing upon her
own experiences as a Chicana, she wrote about such issues as racism,
sexism, imperialism, and poverty, issues that remain pressing today.
With introductory and concluding essays by editors Lorena Oropeza
and Dionne Espinoza, this collection of 44 of Vasquez's original
articles arranged thematically into six chapters seeks to inform and
inspire a new generation. Each is annotated to clarify references to
people and events, and the editors have included English-language
translations of any essays that appeared originally in Spanish. The
text is complemented by six drawings by activist and artistRini
Templeton that originally appeared in El Grito del Norte. The volume
includes a foreword by John Nichols and a preface by Enriqueta
Vasquez.
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A flamenco outfit from Olinda Rodriguez, a professiona singer and dancer who was involved with the Santa Fe Fiesta, dates to the late 1930s and is on exhibit at the New Mexico History Museum.
