Originally published January 23, 2015
By Lisa Y. Garibay
UTEP News Service
From the borderland to Brazil and beyond, UTEP’s Museo Urbano project is using history to make the modern world a better place.
The National Council on Public History’s 2013 Outstanding Public History Project Award-winning initiative is led by Associate Professor and Department of History Chair Yolanda Chávez Leyva, Ph.D. In November 2014, the longtime educator was invited to São Paulo, Brazil, to facilitate the training of a group of international historical and memory museums, sites and initiatives.
Representing Museo Urbano, Leyva facilitated workshops on dialogue and working as a site of conscience for attendees from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Serbia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Cambodia, Bangladesh and other countries.
Upon Museo Urbano’s arrival at UTEP in 2011, it was connected to the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, which co-presented the November conference along with the government of Brazil.
“Things clicked immediately because part of Museo Urbano’s philosophy is that we shouldn’t know history just for the sake of knowing history, but we should connect it to contemporary issues and how we can better society,” Leyva said. “That’s what the [International Coalition of Sites of Conscience] is about as well.”
Museo Urbano now joins more than 200 members of the coalition from all over the world under the motto “from memory to action.”As part of this membership, Leyva has attended a series of training sessions on how to conduct dialogues on immigration. She then came back to UTEP, trained her students and conducted dialogues on campus starting in 2011 – the height of violence in Juárez. Stories kept coming from students as a different angle on immigration.
“Students appreciated that they finally had a place to talk about their experiences with the violence,” Leyva said. “It was pretty powerful.”
As a result of the training she received from the coalition, Leyva was asked to be part of a gathering that was very different from the ones in the United States.
“People in the coalition had always told me that, to them, Museo Urbano seemed more like sites outside of the U.S. rather than the sites within the country in that it is more focused on social justice,” Leyva said, adding that Museo Urbano has more of an international focus that its domestic peers. She jumped at the opportunity to talk in depth with organizers of foreign historical sites and traveled to Brazil for “Memory: A Pillar of Transitional Justice and Human Rights” in November 2014.
Only three U.S. institutions were represented at the conference: the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago, the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation in New York, and Museo Urbano.
The conference focused on how governments can provide justice after a long history of human rights abuses.
One of the first things Leyva did upon her return was to speak in a class about Latin American dictatorships, sharing her experience in Brazil with undergraduate students.
“I always want people to think about the power of history – not just say, ‘Isn’t it cool that we know facts and dates?’ but for it to have a use that makes the world better,” she said.
Much of the work Museo Urbano does is conducted within classes, which Leyva uses to train individuals who can then provide archival help. Many of these students end up as teachers who cultivate further appreciation for history in younger generations.
Leyva has been teaching undergraduate Mexican-American history classes for 25 years this month, which have planted seeds in the minds of many history majors or those going into education. One of the students affected by Leyva’s teaching was Cynthia Renteria, who took the professor’s Mexican-American History course in 2006 as an undergraduate.
“It was the first time I had ever heard anything about public history or oral history,” she said. Given her grandparents’ background in union organizing and educational activism (they helped found Jefferson High School), Leyva’s course and its focus on the local community struck a chord within Renteria, who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in history at UTEP.
“I don’t think I would have followed this path had I not taken that class,” Renteria said. “The class and the work I ended up doing with Museo Urbano had a tremendous impact.”
In joining institutional resources with the community, Museo Urbano has been careful to publicize and stick to its fundamental values: respect for the communities and their histories; reciprocity, or working with communities to understand history; responsibility to the community to improve life in the borderlands; and social justice, which keeps historical preservation rooted in equal partnership.
It has been more than a decade of building trust for Museo Urbano to reach this point, a model that is providing guidance for similar historic sites around the world.
Part of maintaining this trust is Museo Urbano’s lack of permanent location, meaning that its work and exhibits stay within and belong to the people they are about.
This semester, UTEP students are helping Museo Urbano’s effort with the Border Farmworker Center to organize thousands of documents in their archives to make them more accessible to families of braceros and those interested in the bracero program — a guest worker program for Mexican nationals in the U.S. from 1942-1964.
Museo Urbano also is partnering with the UTEP Philosophy Department for the “Philosophy for Children in the Borderlands” project promoting dialogues on immigration for ages 4 and up. Children within the La Mujer Obrera daycare program will be taught that it is possible to express opinions and think philosophically while their parents learn a greater appreciation for their child’s capacity for thought.
All in all, the hope is that those who are currently working to understand and promote history contribute to a continuing cycle of future generations who also commit to the power of history and to working with communities.
Anyone is encouraged to contact Leyva or Renteria about volunteer opportunities (yleyva@utep.edu or ctrenteria@utep.edu), which provide the chance to learn about research, exhibit installation, event planning and more.