As a New York Times reporter in Latin America, Lydia Chavez's work gravitated year after year toward the same painfully familiar themes. With stints as bureau chief in San Salvador and South America, Chavez wrote about violence. She wrote about destitution. And, all too often, she wrote about what she calls "debacle."
"I got tired of looking at Latin America that way," says Chavez, now a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism.
Bolivian hip-hop artist Abraham Bojorquez
Copyright Timothy Wheeler
To show young journalists that stories from strife-ridden regions need not wallow in gloom and gore, Chavez teaches "Art and Culture in Latin America," a semester-long crash course on seeing Latin America from less likely journalistic perspectives. To Chavez, writing about arts and culture doesn't just mean cranking out reviews. Good storytelling about what a nation reads, watches, sees, and sings, she says, provides an alternative and refreshingly effective way to convey the real news about a place.
"In writing about art," she says, "you end up writing about economics, poverty, and war."
For the first four weeks this spring, students in the class imbibed Latin American literature, film, music, and art. The assignment after each session was to conceive pitches for potential stories relevant to that week's medium. Most of these were never actually produced; the idea, Chavez says, was to develop a stronger sense of what makes a good story.
Lydia Chavez
Courtesy Center for Latin American Studies
Teresa Stojkov, a Berkeley scholar of Latin American literature and vice-chair of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, co-taught the class with Chavez as a Carnegie Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism. Stojkov describes her specialty as the nexus where Latin American literature and art meet. She also inaugurated Berkeley's Latin American film series
"Lydia's course is tremendously innovative in concept," Stojkov says, "and is producing creative and responsible journalistic approaches to cultural production."
After gaining a working expertise in Latin America's cultural milieu, students began to hone in on specific stories they would pursue on trips abroad over spring bring. The range of their ideas reflects a dizzying diversity of artistic forms and modes of expression.
Projects included profiles of Nicaraguan poet rumored to be in line for the Nobel Prize; a Guatemalan performance artist who uses her body to remember genocide; and insurgent Mexican painters who say "Basta!" to conceptual art.
First-year journalism school student Stephanie Beasley traveled to Rio to meet the director of Bus 174, a Brazilian documentary about a notorious bus hijacking, only to learn he had just boarded a plane to Los Angeles. But thanks to the depth of her preparations, Chavez says, Beasley thought fast on her feet. She tracked down a police officer featured in the film and told the story of his unlikely encounter with fame.
Second-year j-schooler Timothy Wheeler ventured to the sprawling Bolivian slum of El Alto. There he produced a multi-media project on Radio Wayna Tambo, a grassroots outlet for indigenous hip-hop and hardcore. The left-wing youth movement the station helped inspire is credited with aiding Evo Morales' election triumph last year.
"I like to report on what's actually going on in the streets," Wheeler says. Listening to this music and meeting its young performers makes it clear, Wheeler says, "why the tides in Boliva are changing."
For some students, the class was their first experience traveling in Latin America. Some spoke Spanish fluently, others not at all. Still, Chavez says, every member of the class returned with publishable work.
"The ticket was not a done deal. You had to produce a story that's doable," Chavez says. "They all found good stories. They all really got it."
As for Chavez herself, next year will see her revisited to what for her has become accustomed territory. In her upcoming book Forgotten Battlefields, Chavez returns to places in Central America and the Caribbean the United States has invaded and then abandoned. Amid these kinds altered social landscapes, new forms of creativity invariably emerge.
"Art," Chavez says, "is a product of what's happening around it."
– Marcus Wohlsen