WASHINGTON POST: Will America’s ‘Least Sustainable City’ Vote to Kill Rail Transit?

PHOENIX — It’s 110 degrees, there’s a pollution advisory in effect, and the cloudless sky provides no relief from the brutal sun. Even in the scorching heat, the platforms of the city’s light-rail system are packed with rush-hour commuters on this August afternoon.

“I find driving very unenjoyable. This saves money as well,” said Mike Stein, who uses Valley Metro Rail to commute to his job at one of central Phoenix’s many medical offices every weekday.

Even on days like this one, Stein prefers transit to driving. He’s one of the tens of thousands of Phoenix-area residents who have begun commuting by light rail since the system opened in 2008.

Most major U.S. cities view transit as key to serving their growing populations, reducing congestion and improving air quality by taking vehicles off the road. In the Washington region, where the Metro subway system is expanding into the outer suburbs and the light-rail Purple Line is under construction in suburban Maryland, officials are looking for ways to expand transit options for the same reasons.

But the future of rail transit in Phoenix is in jeopardy, as voters head to the polls Tuesday for a special election to decide whether to allow the city to spend any more money on rail development or instead invest more in auto infrastructure.

Cars and a light rail train pass along Central Avenue in Phoenix, Ariz. during rush hour.

The issue is a crucial one. Phoenix, one of the hottest places in the country, also is one of the fastest-warming, and its fast-growing population, urban sprawl and scarcity of water have earned the desert metropolis a reputation as “America’s least sustainable city.”

Rail supporters say passage of the ballot measure could be economically and environmentally devastating.

“If Phoenix were to stop rail transit investments, it would be going back in time to an old auto-only mode that most cities in the U.S. — and the world — are moving away from,” said Marlon Boarnet, chair of the urban planning and spatial analysis department at the University of Southern California.

Phoenix is the country’s fifth-largest city, but it hasn’t been a major population center for long. The bulk of the region’s growth began after World War II, with the city’s population more than quadrupling between 1950 and 1960. Boarnet said urban development trends in that era strongly favored car travel.

“We were really building many cities, particularly outside of the Northeast, as — for lack of a better phrase — automobile-only,” Boarnet said. There was “very little transit, bus systems were an afterthought, nonmotorized mobility — walking, bicycling — the infrastructure often didn’t even exist.”

Phoenix, like other Western cities developing in the latter half of the 20th century, was designed for highways and sprawl. Transportation trends nationwide began to shift in the 1990s, Boarnet said. Many cities, including Los Angeles, Denver and Seattle, began to retrofit car-oriented infrastructure to include more transit options.

Phoenix followed suit, breaking ground on its original $1.4 billion, 20-mile light-rail system in 2005. Today, the 38-station system runs 28 miles, connecting the city’s downtown business core with the suburbs of Tempe and Mesa, stopping at Sky Harbor International Airport and Arizona State University along the way.

Weekday ridership is around 50,000, a number opponents point out is only about 1 percent of the metro-area population. The light-rail system, the 14th busiest in the country, has been expanded three times since it opened and was built using three voter-approved sales tax increases between 2000 and 2015, in addition to federal funds.

But as projected costs have increased, so has criticism. Since 2015, the budget for planned expansions has more than doubled to $1.35 billion. Construction costs have increased, plans have grown to include a new downtown transit hub, and a federally required contingency budget was added. Opponents say taxpayer money is being wasted, while rail advocates say federal grants will make up much of the difference and the contingency money may never be spent.

Such scrutiny was enough to convince the Phoenix City Council in March to shelve an expansion planned for the western part of the city and reallocate more than $150 million to street repairs.

The next planned phase of development, set to break ground this year, would extend the system five miles into the southern part of the city. But that, too, has sparked criticism, with a group of South Phoenix residents and business owners leading the opposition. In addition to the potential impact on businesses, the proposal has raised concerns about gentrification in South Phoenix, a lower-income part of the city with a large Latino and African American population.

“All these small businesses have been here for decades and you’ll get wiped out and be displaced,” said Susan Gudino, of Building a Better Phoenix, the group leading the fight to end rail funding.

Gudino said the city’s promises for assistance don’t convince her that small businesses in her community would survive the planned four-year construction period for the next phase. She also worries about the changes to traffic flow that would be caused by converting roadway to tracks.

“All the small businesses depend on the car traffic going by,” she said.

The complaints and concerns are similar to those heard during early discussions about Maryland’s Purple Line, now under construction. The 16-mile project is being built through a $5.6-billion public-private partnership,one of the largest of its kind underway in the country.

Skepticism over the South Phoenix extension swelled into the Proposition 105 ballot measure, which would halt not only the South Phoenix line, but any future rail development in the city. If passed, the city would turn away billions in federal transit grants and redirect previously approved sales tax funding to road improvements. In a car-centric city where many roads are in disrepair, those funds could have a more immediate effect, rail opponents say.

Such organized opposition has killed transit projects elsewhere. Donors to Building a Better Phoenix include the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, a group with ties to Americans for Prosperity, an influential political advocacy organization funded by oil industry billionaires Charles and David Koch. David Koch died Friday. Americans for Prosperity has campaigned against transit in Arkansas and Utah, and in 2018 the group led a successful door-knocking campaign to defeat a light-rail project on the ballot in Nashville.

“We’ve tried to watch and learn from Nashville,” said Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego (D), who opposes the ballot measure. “I’ve tried to do town halls and community meetings in every corner of the city so people can understand why [light rail] matters.”

Gallego attributes the revitalization of the city’s downtown to the light-rail system and notes that Phoenix is the largest city in the country not connected by Amtrak. To compete economically, Phoenix needs more rail development, she said.

“It’s also a value statement. Do we want to make sure that people in our community have access to good schools, good jobs, medical care? Do we want to make sure that people have chances at affordable housing where a lower percentage of their budget can go to transportation so they don’t need a car? Great urban cities have options,” Gallego said.

Easing traffic is an immediate goal, but the mayor also is concerned about the city’s pollution and climate in the long-term. The American Lung Association ranks Phoenix among the worst places for ozone pollution in the United States, and Climate Central projects Phoenix will have 147 days a year with a heat index above 105 degrees by 2050. Those public health concerns could bring major economic losses for the city.

Rail transit could help, Boarnet said. He co-wrote a 2012 study of households near a newly opened Los Angeles light-rail line and found, on average, access to the train led families to reduce driving by 10 miles per day, or about 40 percent. Multiply those numbers by the thousands of people living near the rail lines and the effect on traffic, smog and carbon emissions is measurable, Boarnet said.

“In a place like Phoenix, these same factors would work. We don’t have any reason not to believe that,” he said.

Boarnet cautioned that light rail alone will not solve climate and pollution problems. A city needs multiple transit options, as well as land-use policies that encourage denser housing near transit to be fully effective, he said. Although the nationwide trend is toward more public transit, in many cities, ridership is declining.

“I do not interpret this as ‘people don’t like the bus and never will,’ ” Boarnet said. He views the trend as an indication that cities still have work to do to provide the most effective transit systems.

The challenge is getting big-picture goals to resonate with voters. Boarnet said transit-related votes can be difficult because they ask voters to imagine results that might be decades away.

“This is literally a play for what should Phoenix look like about 20 to 30 years from now,” he said.

It’s a future he can see clearly though. Rail transit has the capacity to move tens of thousands of people per hour, while freeways might move only a small fraction of that. The Phoenix area is growing by more than 200 people per day. Sooner or later, the city will simply run out of space to efficiently move everyone by car, Boarnet said.

“Phoenix voters may not feel like they’re there yet,” he said. “The difficulty is, if they don’t do anything else, they’re going to get there eventually.”

Read this story on Washington Post

(Un)Affordable Podcast

Arizona has a reputation for being an affordable place to live. But that’s not the case anymore. Rent prices in the Phoenix area are rising about twice as fast as the national average. And with around 200 people moving to Maricopa County every day, demand for housing keeps rising. In this podcast we explore the obstacles that are making the cost of housing in Phoenix harder and harder for many residents to afford.

Katherine Davis-Young reported, wrote, produced and hosts (Un)Affordable for Hear Arizona/ KJZZ.

Listen to the complete series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR One, or wherever you get your podcasts

WASHINGTON POST: For many Native Americans, embracing LGBT members is a return to the past

The sound of drums, singing and prayers marked the opening of a powwow in Phoenix on a Saturday afternoon this month. Marchers carried the flags of the United States and some of Arizona’s tribal nations onto the grass field, but the procession also included rainbow flags, and the pink and blue transgender flag. It was Arizona’s first Two-Spirit Powwow, one of a handful of powwows that have sprung up across North America to celebrate LGBT Native Americans.

Among the marchers in the grand entry was Kay Kisto, the reigning Miss Indian Transgender Arizona. “To actually be here, to be at the first-ever [Two-Spirit Powwow] in Arizona — I’ve been having goose bumps ever since I got here,” Kisto said.

Kisto, 35, grew up on the Gila River Indian Reservation, south of Phoenix. Growing up, she feared harassment or violence if she were to reveal her transgender identity. But to be able to celebrate her identity and heritage in an event on her tribe’s traditional lands was an overwhelming feeling and a sign of change, she said.

Dozens of Two-Spirit organizations have formed around North America in recent years. California’s Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirit Powwow is now in its eighth year and draws as many as 4,000 attendees annually. Canadian cities Saskatoon and Winnipeg have recently hosted Two-Spirit powwows. And in 2018, a Two-Spirit contingent took part in the grand entry at the Gathering of Nations, the world’s largest powwow, for the first time.

Two-Spirit, an umbrella term for non-binary definitions of gender and sexuality from Native American traditions, takes inspiration from terminology in the Ojibwe language for men who filled women’s roles in society, or women who took on men’s roles. Many of North America’s indigenous traditions include more than just male and female understandings of gender, but hundreds of years of forced assimilation stamped out many tribes’ customs and oral traditions. Two-Spirit powwows are part of a growing movement among Native Americans who say rigid ideas of gender and sexuality are unfortunate remnants of colonization — participants say it’s time to rethink native identities on their own terms.

“There’s no way you can talk about colonization without talking about gender and sexuality,” said Chris Finley, assistant professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and member of the Colville Nation.

When Europeans came to North America, they brought patriarchal societal traditions with them, Finley said. Wrapped up in those gender roles were Europeans’ understandings of land ownership and inheritance, ideas that were crucial to the process of seizing the continent from indigenous people.

Among the measures used to extinguish native customs in the United States was the state-sponsored Native American boarding school program, which forced generations of indigenous children to attend school away from their families to be educated in Christian, European traditions.

“If you don’t lose your language, start practicing Christianity, cut your hair, learn to speak English, you will die. That’s the choice so many native people were given,” said Roger Kuhn, board member of Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits, and member of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians.

“Assimilation means you lose a lot of your identity,” Kuhn said, “and in that assimilation process I think is where we went astray with sexuality.”

Navajo tradition includes at least four genders. But generations of Navajo people like Sheila Lopez never learned that piece of cultural history.

Lopez grew up in Winslow, Ariz., just outside the Navajo Nation Reservation. Two of her three children identify as gay. Lopez is the founder of Phoenix Native PFLAG, the only Native American-focused chapter of the nationwide organization for families and allies of LGBT people.

“This community is marginalized and stigmatized and harassed,” Lopez said. “When [my children] came out, it was so hard for me, because I knew that society wasn’t so accepting.” Attitudes toward LGBT people vary across North America’s more than 500 distinct indigenous cultures, but a 2015 survey from the National Center for Transgender Equality found transgender Native Americans experienced disproportionately high rates of rejection by immediate family compared with transgender people from other backgrounds. Same-sex marriage remains a point of debate in some tribes.

It was only after learning her children were gay that Lopez first heard of the Navajos’ broader definitions of gender.

“For me, it’s like, why wasn’t I taught that?” she said. “We need to start talking about bringing back those traditions of accepting everyone no matter your orientation or your gender expression.”

In planning the Arizona Two-Spirit Powwow, Lopez looked to the BAAITS Powwow. Kuhn said the event includes the music, food, dancing and handicrafts common to powwows across North America, but it takes a unique approach to gender. A Native American drum circle is generally defined as a male space, while some dance styles such as the buckskin dance are typically performed by women. Early in its history, the BAAITS Powwow did away with those gender rules.

Stereotypes about Native Americans often conflate living people with ancient cultures. “We’re the only race who’s expected to stay exactly the same,” Finley said. For her, gender and sexuality present exciting opportunities to create new native traditions.

“A lot of the things that come up with gender and sexuality are things that we actually can change within our own communities,” Finley said. “We don’t have to wait for settlers to pass acts of Congress or start giving us our land back. This is work we can do now, for ourselves, with ourselves.”

Read this story on the Washington Post

PRI THE WORLD: This tour group takes you beyond the border to Nogales’ culinary scene

The border town of Nogales is sometimes referred to as “ambos Nogales” or both Nogales. That’s because part of the community is in Arizona, and part is in Sonora, Mexico. The twin towns are divided by a metal wall, nearly two stories high, and a few months ago, U.S. military troops deployed to the border added half-a-dozen rows of razor wire to the barrier.

A high wall covered in razor wire divides the towns of Nogales, Ariz. and Nogales, Mexico. The Nogales, Ariz. City Council has asked the U.S. federal government to remove the razor wire.

It doesn’t look like a tourist attraction, but this is where most tours with the Border Community Alliance begin. The tour groups meet up on the US side, then it’s just a short walk through a metal detector, then a gate, and into Mexico. No one checks your ID, no one asks questions.

“We want to show that there’s so much more going on and very positive,” said Alex La Pierre, program director for Border Community Alliance. The goal of the cross-border tours, he said, is “citizen-level diplomacy, bringing people to Mexico to make up their own minds.”

La Pierre guides these tours, taking hundreds of Americans each year to see what’s really on the other side of the border. The Arizona-based nonprofit offers multiple travel itineraries, including overnight tours and day-trips, all of them meant to counteract fears about the border region. Some tours highlight local businesses or area history, but this tour was all about Sonoran cuisine.

“The act of sitting at a table and breaking bread with someone is almost ritualistic in promoting good relations. And what’s not to like about food?” La Pierre said.

A group of 15 Americans were on this Gastronomic Nogales day-trip, and one of the day’s highlights was a meal at La Llorona, a cozy restaurant with star-shaped lanterns twinkling from the ceiling, a hand-drawn chalkboard menu and, most importantly, really tasty food.

“I had birria, which is a soup that’s complex with chiles and delicious beef. I could eat this probably every day,” said Quince Affolter, a visitor from Portland, Oregon.

The upscale menu at La Llorona is not the cheese-covered fare standard at many Mexican restaurants in the US. This meal, and all of the stops on this tour, were focused on challenging stereotypes about Mexico.

As it happens, these Americans walked over the border for this tour the day after US President Donald Trump declared a national emergency to build a border wall.

Affolter said, it doesn’t feel to her like there’s an emergency, “Certainly my experience in being here, everything is easy and very normal. It’s fun to see the streets so alive.”

This border community isn’t totally free of crime, though. Last month, US Customs and Border Protection made their largest seizure ever of the drug fentanyl in Nogales. Trump tweeted his thanks to the border agents who made the drug bust, while critics pointed out that the bust happened at a legal point of entry, and a border wall couldn’t have stopped that.

Alex La Pierre stops on a sidewalk in Nogales, Mexico to tell American tourists about some of the area’s history.

But La Pierre said, when debates over drugs and violence dominate the news about the border, Americans only hear a tiny part of a much bigger story.  

“We really see this work as being on the front trenches of changing minds about the border region,” he said.

Most people who come on Border Community Alliance tours are Arizona “snowbirds,” retirees from colder parts of the country, who spend winter months in the Southwest. La Pierre said that puts his organization in a unique position to be able to spread good news about the borderlands across the US.  

“We basically charge them with the homework that you’re now a goodwill ambassador for Mexico because you’ve had a firsthand experience,” he said. “So go back to Minnesota or go back to New Hampshire, wherever you live, half of the year, and please share with your neighbors.”

Some Nogalenses wish that message would reach more Americans too. Alma Grijalva runs a casual fish taco shop called El Pescadito, the first stop on this gastronomic tour. She said she gets a lot of American diners, especially on the weekends. She’s happy to serve them, she said, but wishes relations between Americans and Mexicans weren’t so politically uncomfortable right now.

“We’re neighbors, we’re almost brothers, we should be fine,” she said in Spanish.

From El Pescadito, the tour group rode in a van through Nogales, all the while hearing the history of the area from La Pierre. The tour passed busy shopping areas, sports arenas and schools — signs of a city whose population has exploded since the 1990s. That’s due, in large part, to manufacturing jobs and an economy built around cross-border trade.

Later in the afternoon, the tour stopped at Cerveceria Argova, a new craft brewery. Andres Vega, the 20-something Nogalense entrepreneur who started the business, said he wants Americans to see that his hometown is a great place to visit.

Andres Vega pours beer for American visitors on a gastronomic tour of Nogales with the Arizona nonprofit, Border Community Alliance.

“We need to change that perspective from the USA that Mexico is so different and difficult, right? But you can come, and get really good food and really good beer,” he said.  

The trip across the border wasn’t completely hassle-free. To get back into the US, the American visitors waited in line, presented their passports and answered a custom agent’s questions before crossing back through that razor wire-covered gate.

This month, the city council of Nogales, Arizona passed a resolution demanding the federal government remove the razor wire, saying their city isn’t a war zone or a prison.

That’s something that’s become clear to border tourist Peg Wickliffe. After a day of tacos, craft beer and history lessons, she said all of the anxiety surrounding the border feels misplaced to her.

“It’s just like going down the road — it is going down the road. I mean, they’re our neighbors, this is our neighborhood, if there wasn’t a wall,” she said.  

After all, Wickliffe said, it’s pretty hard to feel scared of someone once you’ve sat down for a meal with them.

Listen to this story on PRI The World

ATLAS OBSCURA: The College Student Who Decoded the Data Hidden in Inca Knots

There are many ways a college student might spend spring break. Making an archaeological breakthrough is not usually one of them. In his first year at Harvard, Manny Medrano did just that.

“There’s something in me, I can’t explain where it came from, but I love the idea of digging around and trying to find secrets hidden from the past,” Medrano says.

With the help of his professor, Gary Urton, a scholar of Pre-Columbian studies, Medrano interpreted a set of six khipus, knotted cords used for record keeping in the Inca Empire. By matching the khipus to a colonial-era Spanish census document, Medrano and Urton uncovered the meaning of the cords in greater detail than ever before. Their findings could contribute to a better understanding of daily life in the Andean civilization.

The Inca Empire reached its height of power in 15th- and 16th-century Peru. When Spanish conquistadors invaded, the Inca had established the largest and most complex society in the Americas. Architectural marvels from the civilization, such as Machu Picchu, survive to this day, but the Inca left behind no written records.

The only records the Inca are known to have kept are in the form of intricately knotted khipu textiles. In 2002, Urton began Harvard’s Khipu Database Project. He traveled to museums and private collections around the world to record the numbers of knots, lengths of cords, colors of fibers, and other distinguishing details about every Inca khipu he could find—more than 900 in total.

Urton says he and other researchers in the field have always had a general sense of what the khipus represented. Many, they could tell, had to do with census data. Others appeared to be registers of goods or calendar systems. But, until recently, none of the khipus Urton studied could be understood on a very detailed level. If the khipus held messages or cultural information beyond just numbers, the meanings were opaque to modern scholars.

A turning point came when Urton began looking into a set of six khipus from the 17th-century Santa River Valley region of Northwest Peru. One day, Urton picked up a book and happened to spot a Spanish census document from the same region and time period.

“A lot of the numbers that were recorded in that census record matched those six khipus exactly,” Urton says.

It was an exciting enough coincidence that Urton mentioned it to his undergraduate students at the end of class in the spring of 2016. For Medrano, who was sitting in the lecture hall that day, it was too enticing of a lead to ignore.

“I walked up to him and said, ‘hey, spring break is coming up, if you need someone to put a few hours into this, I’d be happy to take a look,’” Medrano recalls.

Medrano, now a 21-year-old junior, was a freshman at the time. He is majoring in economics, but had always found archaeology interesting and had enrolled in Urton’s course on the Inca civilization, curious to study a period of history about which he knew little.

Urton agreed to allow Medrano to look into the Santa Valley khipus and the Spanish census. “[I wasn’t] thinking he’d ever do much with it because I’d had one or two other people look at it before and nobody could ever come up with anything,” Urton says.

The khipus in question are in a private collection in Peru, so Medrano worked from information Urton had recorded in his khipu database. Medrano recalls combing through spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel, graphing some of the data, and enjoying the hunt for patterns.

“I have a love of puzzles, just for entertainment. I love to do a Sudoku on a plane or something, but this is so much more profound,” he says.

Medrano comes from a Mexican-American family and speaks Spanish, so understanding the Spanish census document was no problem. Handling numbers and data came naturally to him as well, as an economics major. The challenge, as both Medrano and Urton note, seemed to demand a perfect alignment of his skills and interests.

“Not every archaeology project operates in Excel,” Medrano points out.

Medrano noticed that the way each cord was tied onto the khipu seemed to correspond to the social status of the 132 people recorded in the census document. The colors of the strings also appeared to be related to the people’s first names. The correlations seemed too strong to be a coincidence. After spring break, Medrano told his professor about his theories.

“I just remember being pretty excited, that, ‘Wow! I think the guy’s got it,’” Urton says. “There were a couple of things that didn’t add up and I’d point that out and he’d take it back and work on it for a week or two and come back and he would have understood something about it at a deeper level.”

Medrano worked with Urton over the next several months and the two compiled their findings into a paper which will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Ethnohistory in January. Medrano is the first author on the paper, indicating he contributed the bulk of the research, something Urton notes is extremely rare for an undergraduate student.

Sabine Hyland researches Andean anthropology at the University of St. Andrews. She has read Medrano and Urton’s forthcoming paper and describes their discoveries as “thrilling.”

“Manny has proven that the way in which pendant cords are tied to the top cord indicates which social group an individual belonged to. This is the first time anyone has shown that and it’s a big deal,” Hyland says.

Urton is now optimistic that the six khipus examined in the research could serve as a key to decode the hundreds of others he has in his database. The colors of the cords as they relate to first names could hint at the meanings of colors in other khipus, for example.

“There’s a lot we can draw on from this one case,” Urton says.

But what’s most exciting to Urton and Medrano is the potential to better understand Inca history from the indigenous point of view. As Medrano puts it, “history has been written from the perspective of the conquerors and to reverse that hierarchy is what I see this project as doing.”

Read this story on Atlas Obscura

Image:  Claus Ableiter nur hochgeladen aus enWiki – enWiki, hochgeladen von User Lyndsaruell; siehe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Inca_Quipu.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2986739

ATLAS OBSCURA: The Migrant Quilt Project Remembers Lives Lost Along the U.S.-Mexico Border

The 14 quilts that make up the Migrant Quilt Project are each unique. One looks like a large American flag, one shows silhouetted cacti against an orange sunset, one is quilted with rows of small white skulls. But all of the quilts share one feature: long lists of names, such as Jose Lara Avila, Margarita Rios Rodriguez, or Rufino Hernandez. But the most common name, listed again and again on every quilt, is desconocido, unknown.

The Migrant Quilt Project is a folk art memorial to the hundreds of people who die each year attempting to cross over the border from Mexico into the United States. Alongside the lists of names, small scraps of jeans, handkerchiefs, and other personal items found in the desert are sewn into each quilt to symbolize the human side of illegal immigration. Though illegal immigration to the United States has slowed in recent years, routes taken by migrants have become increasingly dangerous. The organizers of the quilt project hope to bring attention to the continuing issue of migrant fatalities.

“When [the quilts] are hung en masse, they are stunning and it’s overwhelming,” says Jody Ipsen, the project’s director, as she prepares for a showing of the quilts at a church in Oro Valley, Arizona. “More than anything, people say, ‘I had no idea. I had no idea people were dying in the desert.’”

A quilt from the Migrant Quilt Project is displayed at a church in Oro Valley, Arizona. The quilts list names of migrants who died in the Arizona desert and incorporate personal items found along migrant routes such as jeans and handkerchiefs.

Ipsen has lived in Tucson, Arizona, about 60 miles north of the border, since the 1960s. She says for years she’s watched the border become more militarized. But it was on a camping trip in 2005 that she really started to think about how dangerous and politically charged it had become.

Ipsen was hiking in the Arizona desert when she came upon a trail covered by discarded clothing, diapers, water bottles, and tuna cans. “At first I was appalled,” she says. She thought that the items were just litter, carelessly abandoned in an otherwise pristine natural area. But when she realized she was looking at the remains of a migrant camp, her concerns changed.

She began volunteering with humanitarian groups that provide water and aid to people crossing the desert. She learned more about the challenges faced by undocumented migrants, often fleeing violence in Central America. She also volunteered with desert cleanup organizations, with whom she’d sometimes dispose of clothing or trash left by migrants.

“I felt really compelled, like, maybe there’s something we can do with this migrant clothing we find in the desert to speak to the issues in a more in-depth way,” Ipsen says.

Ipsen knew of the NAMES Project and its AIDS Memorial Quilt, with its thousands of six-foot-long quilted panels made by volunteers to remember loved ones lost to the AIDS epidemic. She wondered if she might be able to launch a similar memorial for undocumented migrants who had died on their journeys to Arizona. But Ipsen had spent her career in the publishing industry and had never made a quilt. So she partnered with nonprofits, church groups, and individual volunteers from around the United States and started what would become a years-long, collaborative sewing effort.

Each quilt represents one year of fatalities that occurred within the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency’s Tucson Sector, which covers most of Arizona’s border. For some years, the quilts list around 100 people, both named and unknown. Other years, they list nearly 300. The quilts incorporate personal items found in the desert, believed to have belonged to migrants.

Though the quilts are meant to memorialize those who have died in the deserts, the scraps of clothing used do not come from sites where bodies were found. Rather, they are items that have been abandoned under the desert sun, usually found in trash heaps along with food scraps and other garbage. On the rare occasion Ipsen and her volunteers find a backpack or piece of clothing with some form of identification on it, they will hand the item over to the Consulate of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, or appropriate country.

Jody Ipsen, left, and Peggy Hazard, right, stand in front of a quilt from the Migrant Quilt Project. The quilts memorialize the hundreds of migrants who die each year attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

Peggy Hazard is a retired gallery curator who now helps Ipsen coordinate the Migrant Quilt Project. She also helped make one of the quilts.

“The whole experience was emotionally fraught,” Hazard says.

She has been a quilter most of her life, but says working with pieces of worn-out jeans and sun-faded bandanas felt different. The quilt she worked on also included a set of hand-embroidered cloth napkins.

She will never know to whom those belonged, but she says, “Those particularly moved my heart because I knew somebody had spent the time to stitch those and then send them with their loved one.”

What troubles Ipsen and Hazard is that migrant fatalities have not declined over the past decade. The clandestine nature of illegal immigration makes data difficult to accurately collect, but the numbers that are available suggest the percentage of migrants who die crossing the border is growing.

The Missing Migrants Project of the UN’s International Organization for Migration reports more than 250 migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border so far for 2017, slightly more than the same period in 2016. Meanwhile, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports a nearly 40 percent decline in apprehensions of migrants this year, a signal that fewer people seem to be making the journey than in prior years.

“Even though fewer migrants are crossing, they’re taking more risks,” Julia Black, project coordinator with the Missing Migrants Project, says in a phone interview from her Berlin office. “The data indicates that it is more dangerous for migrants crossing into the U.S. this year than last year.”

Since 2012, the Migrant Quilt Project quilts have been displayed at border issues conferences, museums, churches, and universities around the country. Ipsen says she hopes showing the quilts will honor those who have lost their lives, and also inspire policy change to bring an end to border fatalities.

Those kinds of efforts to raise awareness are crucial, according to Reyna Araibi, a spokesperson for Colibrí Center for Human Rights.

“What’s really going to change policy is these really human-centered narratives,” Araibi says. Her organization provides resources for families searching for migrants who have gone missing crossing the border, and currently has more than 2,400 open cases. “You cannot make any type of progress on this issue if we’re not talking about both the numbers and the humans behind it.”

The idea of using quilts to spark political conversation is nothing new, Hazard says. Abolitionists, suffragettes, and leaders of the temperance movement are known to have used quilts as a form of activism. “For a long time women didn’t have many rights, so women used the power of the needle, whether embroidery or making quilts, to get their point across,” Hazard says.

Ipsen says she hopes the quilts illustrate a problem that anyone can relate to, even while border policies and immigration issues have become more politically divisive.

“Whatever your feelings are, whether they’re illegal or not, these are human lives, people with families,” Ipsen says. “Human life is sacred.” She says she and her volunteers will keep making quilts “until there are no more deaths in the desert.”

Read this story on Atlas Obscura

NEPR: Will Hampshire College’s Flag Fight Affect Enrollment?

Enrollment matters a lot for a school like Hampshire College, with just about 1400 students and a relatively small endowment. So Hampshire had some budget problems this year, when the student body came up about 60 students short.

“We under-enrolled,” said Meredith Twombly, dean of  enrollment and retention at Hampshire. “We missed when we guessed what our yield was going to be.”

Twombly said the 51-year-old college changed its admissions process over the last few years, trying to become more selective.

“These are just things that happen when you make a dramatic shift in your strategy,” she said. “It takes a while for things to get predictable.”.

At the time, the school also cited campus protests over racism as a potential factor in the decline. Fewer applicants chose to attend, and more students than expected decided not to return.

This year, Twombly and her team changed their strategy again. They made more conservative estimates and hoped to see enrollment pick back up next fall.

But right as application season kicked off, Hampshire College was all over cable news.

A few days after the election, the American flag at the center of campus was burned. The school president later had the flag taken down, saying it was distracting from a larger conversation about the school’s values.

Veterans protested, politicians complained, the flag went back up and the situation drew a lot of attention to the small college.

Discussing the situation on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly made this prediction:

“Well, they’re done. The college is done,” O’Reilly said. “It’s a laughing stock.”

But could a controversy like this actually have an impact on Hampshire’s enrollment?

Jonathan Smith is an assistant professor of economics at Georgia State University. He’s the co-author of a new research paper that measures how a scandal on a college campus can impact applications to the school.

“Students certainly do respond to scandals negatively,” Smith said.

Smith’s research shows that just one negative mention of a college in the New York Times can reduce applications 5 percent. A long-form article can cause a decline of 10 percent.

“So there’s sort of this increasing relationship where you see the more media attention there was around a particular scandal, the fewer applications the school would get the following year,” he said.

But they key word in Smith’s research is “scandal.” He’s focused on serious crimes like sexual assault or violent hazing. The situation at Hampshire, though controversial, doesn’t quite fit the bill.

“I think what happened at Hampshire College has the potential to attract some applicants, but also deter some applicants, so it’s not exactly obvious what’s going to happen on net,” Smith said.

It’s an out-of-the-ordinary situation and Hampshire is an out-of-the-ordinary college. The school has no majors, no letter grades and it was founded on a philosophy of alternative education.

Adam Metsch is president of a private college advising company called College Advisor of New England. He’s helped students and families through the process of picking colleges for more than 20 years. Metsch said a school’s atmosphere is one of the most important things for applicants to consider.

“It’s not about elite kids getting into elite schools; it’s about understanding what the dominant culture of a school is,” he said. “Not just size, location, major, but political climate, for example.”

Metsch said Hampshire College is not the kind of school just any student would want to apply to, and those who do apply are probably expecting something a little different.

Dana Maple Feeney is a third-year at Hampshire and the unique atmosphere is exactly why she decided to enroll.

“I showed up and I just felt so much different than I felt anywhere else — just hearing people talk about what they were studying,” Feeney said. “And I don’t think anything really would have changed that feeling.”

Feeney said her younger brother is looking at colleges right now and she’s encouraging him to consider Hampshire.

Meanwhile, Twombly hopes that — for new applicants — Hampshire’s distinctive campus culture will outweigh recent criticisms of the school.

Hampshire’s first two admissions deadlines, for early decision and early action candidates, have already passed. Twombly said so far, those show about a 5 percent increase in applications over last year.

“That was my first indicator that, you know, this might not have a big impact,” she said.

The protests at Hampshire have dispersed. The news trucks have left. Pundits have moved onto the next subject.

And, Twombly said she feels optimistic looking ahead to the college’s biggest application deadline in mid-January.

 

Listen to this story on New England Public Radio

NEPR: In Academia, A Push For More Generous Parental Leave

New England has long held a reputation as a hub for higher education. Just in Massachusetts, colleges and universities employ more than 120,000 people.

The experience of working at a college can vary greatly campus-to-campus, and that includes employee benefits like parental leave for staff and faculty. One college in the Pioneer Valley is trying to set a new standard.

“This is my first child and it’s been a roller coaster ride,” Amanda Huntleigh said with a laugh.

Huntleigh works as a choral director and lecturer works as a choral director and lecturer in the music department at Smith College. But since August, she’s been focused on her new son, Aramis.

“He’s only at the point developmentally right now where he can sometimes be away from me,” she said last month at her home in Northampton. “And the thought of having to drop him off for 40 hours a week is horrifying.”

But Aramis isn’t headed to daycare just yet. Huntleigh is one of the first Smith College employees to take advantage of the school’s new parental leave policy.

This summer, Huntleigh was pregnant when the private women’s college announced it would extend paid leave for a child’s primary caregiver. Staff, who had eight weeks paid leave before, now get 12 weeks paid. And faculty who previously had been relieved of teaching for a semester, now get a break from administrative duties, too.

The policy also extends leave times and reduces teaching loads for non-primary caregivers.

“My first thought was, ‘This was awesome before and now it’s even better,’” Huntleigh said.

As of 2015, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 14 percent of university, college and junior college employees had access to paid family leave. That’s slightly higher than the U.S. workforce as a whole.

And that number has an impact on the profession, according to Mary Ann Mason. She’s a law professor at UC berkeley and co-author of the book, Do Babies Matter: Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower.

“The baby issue is the main reason why academics drop out of the pipeline,” Mason said. “Often at the graduate school level.”

In the last decade, Mason said, she’s seen more universities catch onto the trend of increasing family leave time, which she said is important for keeping women in academia. But she said traditionally, in this competitive profession, women have been expected to keep up with male colleagues at any cost.

Kathleen McCartney, president of Smith College, knows that first-hand.

When I was an assistant professor, there was no parental leave policy,” she said. “I did ask for a course reduction, and I was told it would not be fair to the men in my department.”

Kathleen McCartney, president of Smith College sits in her office. McCartney decided to expand the parental leave policies at the college after writing an op-ed in the Boston Globe on the issue.

In the three decades since, McCartney said, not enough has changed. That concerns her not just as a mother and grandmother, but as a researcher. She’s spent the bulk of her career as a psychologist studying early childhood development.

“In the United States, there is really no guarantee of paid parental leave…although some businesses do offer it, but not enough and not for long enough,” she said.

In 2015, McCartney published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe arguing just that, and that op-ed prompted her to reconsider Smith’s policies. Now, she said, she hopes Smith’s change might lead the way for other schools.

Among the Five Colleges — Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith and UMass — family leave policies vary widely school-to-school, from a few weeks to whole semesters, unpaid to fully paid, and with different benefits for faculty or staff.

Amherst College, for example, offers staff four weeks of paid leave for the birth or adoption of a child. Staff could get to 12 weeks at full pay, but they would need to combine benefits such as the school’s short-term disability program, sick time or vacation days.

Mason said there are plenty of reasons why institutions are hesitant to adopt lengthier leave policies.

“It is expensive for universities to offer lavish absences,” Mason said. “It does slow projects down. There’s no easy way to say that everything’s going to be the same when someone’s out for six months or six weeks.”

That’s especially true in higher education, where there’s already pressure to keep research output high and tuition prices low. But McCartney said she’s optimistic Smith’s new policy will accommodate new parents without too much disruption to the classroom — or the budget.

“In most cases, we’re not replacing faculty and staff, instead other people are taking on other responsibilities,” she said.

Amanda Huntleigh said she is grateful for that flexibility.

“Planning to have a baby rarely fits in with the academic career path, so we finally just decided we were doing it whether it made the most sense or not,” Huntleigh said.

Huntleigh is 35, and she and her husband waited a few years to have a child. She said it’s just a coincidence that Aramis arrived right in time for Smith’s policy change.

“Having never done this any other way,” she said, “I don’t know how people who don’t have this time manage it.”

Listen to this story on New England Public Radio

KPCC: Should farmers markets be required to accept food stamps? City Council weighs in

 

Update: The Los Angeles City Council voted Friday to direct the city attorney to draft an ordinance making it mandatory for all farmers markets to accept EBT cards (the electronic equivalent of food stamps). The vote was 11-0 with four council members absent.

Every Sunday morning, the Hollywood Farmers Market pops up at the corner of Hollywood and Ivar. It’s one of about 60 farmers markets that regularly appears in the city of L.A.

Shopper Kris Jones is a regular at this market. “Vendors here have a lot more information about what makes their food healthy,” she said. “I like that you can ask questions and get answers. Going to your local grocery you don’t always get that.”

Another bonus for Jones–she’s able to pay for her produce at this market using CalFresh Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, the government assistance program formerly known as food stamps.

According to County data, well over a million people in the L.A. area rely on CalFresh to buy groceries each month. Even more are eligible for the program but haven’t enrolled.

But according to the Los Angeles Food Policy Council, more than half of farmers markets in L.A. don’t accept EBT.

“It seemed very curious to us that farmers markets, which we all love, are not as inclusive to our low income neighbors as they could be,” said Clare Fox, executive director of the L.A. Food Policy Council.

Fox’s organization is working with the L.A. City Council to make EBT a requirement at all farmers markets in L.A.

Through the CalFresh program, farmers markets can get a no-cost, wireless point-of-sale device from the state–it’s a lot like a portable credit card reader. Shoppers can swipe their EBT card at the manager’s booth in exchange for vouchers that they can use at the market’s produce stalls.

Kate Miller (right) and Elizabeth Bowman (left) assist shoppers redeeming CalFresh benefits at the Hollywood Farmers Market. Shoppers visit the Farmers Market manager's table where they can swipe their EBT card in exchange for paper vouchers to use throughout the market.
Kate Miller (right) and Elizabeth Bowman (left) assist shoppers redeeming CalFresh benefits at the Hollywood Farmers Market. Shoppers visit the Farmers Market manager’s table where they can swipe their EBT card in exchange for paper vouchers to use throughout the market.

Albert Tlatoa, with the South Central Farmers Cooperative has been working at farmers markets throughout L.A. for 10 years. He’s worked at some that do accept EBT and some that don’t.

“It’s a different system for each market, each organization runs their farmers market differently.  We would like to take it, but we don’t take it all the time,” he said.

He said when he can accept EBT, he definitely sees more business.

The Food Policy Council says that’s a common story. Their research suggests farmers markets that add EBT typically see an increase in revenue. Programs like Hunger Action Los Angeles’ Market Match, which provides matching funds to some EBT shoppers to incentivize shopping at farmers markets, often bring even more business to vendors, Fox said.

Even so, some markets have been reluctant to adopt EBT. Fox said many simply don’t know about the program. And getting the program set up takes a lot of paperwork.

“For farmers markets that have mostly volunteers, or a lot of turnover in staff, some of the smaller operations, that might be hard to do,” Fox said.

But City Councilman Jose Huizar, who’s backing the ordinance, said those are minor issues compared to citywide health concerns.

“If you have a farmer’s market that doesn’t have EBT, that individual who uses it is going to to go to a local store that perhaps doesn’t have fresh fruit and vegetables, so at the end of the day this is going to allow for a healthier individual with the use of EBT and a healthier Los Angeles,” Huizar said.

Huizar is optimistic that, if passed, the ordinance could go into effect within six months.

The City Council will face some challenges. Some farmers markets take place in parks, others on streets, and others on private property, so there’s no one-size-fits-all permitting process that would make it easy to enforce an EBT law across Los Angeles.

Fox said the law wouldn’t be a silver bullet solution to the city’s food access problems. There are still many more farmers markets in affluent neighborhoods than in low income areas. But Fox said, “It sends a very strong message that the city is taking proactive steps toward addressing the crisis that we see around obesity, diet-related disease, and access to healthy food facing low income communities and communities of color.”

For shoppers like Jones, the more healthy options, the better. “One of the big draws for me is being able to come here and get fresh local fruit and vegetables and all that and use my card,” she said.

Listen to this story on KPCC

KPCC: UCLA project puts LA indigenous communities on the map

 

L.A. is home to one of the largest populations of indigenous people in the United States. That includes those who are native to Southern California and indigenous peoples who have relocated here.

Yet many of L.A.’s indigenous peoples find that awareness of their communities can be lacking among the general population.

“As a teenager I got really frustrated when people would ask me ‘Where are you from? What’s your heritage?’ and I would tell them, and they would know nothing about the indigenous people of this area. A lot of our own people didn’t even know,” said Craig Torres, a member of the Tongva community. His ancestors, sometimes called Gabrieleño, were native to the L.A. basin before European settlers arrived.

Craig Torres teaches young students in the Rancho Los Alamitos historic gardens in Long Beach. Torres is a member of the Tongva community. Growing up, he says he had little access to information about his heritage, now he spends his days educating children about Southern California's indigenous peoples.

Since the Tongva people have never been federally recognized as a tribe, they have no reservation, no official cultural center, and only scattered resources for preserving their heritage. That lack of access to accurate information about L.A.’s Native American communities sparked an idea with a group of researchers at UCLA.

“Really what we wanted to do is create kind of a virtual world where people would have access to the different-layered indigenous L.A.,” said Mishuana Goeman, a member of the Tonawanda band of Seneca Indians, and a professor at UCLA.

Goeman and other faculty and student researchers are developing a new educational website called Mapping Indigenous LA. The site aims to be a  comprehensive resource for information about L.A.’s indigenous groups. Goeman and the rest of the team collaborated with community members to piece together L.A.’s history told from the indigenous perspective.

MILA10

“When we’re looking at everything around us in L.A., everything is fenced off, has boundaries, people own this, people own that,” said Desiree Martinez, a Tongva community member and an archaeologist. “But for native communities, when we look at the land, it’s all connected. So we’re trying to document the way native people look at the land.”

The site points out some L.A. places that indigenous people see differently, like the area of downtown L.A. where indigenous slaves were once traded, or Kuruvunga Springs near UCLA, which was once the center of a thriving Tongva village.

“Those places have been excavated archeologically, but you have to know where to find that information,” said Wendy Teeter, curator of archaeology for UCLA’s Fowler Museum and another researcher for the Mapping Indigenous L.A. project. “Los Angeles’ history really needs to be given back to people and we need to have those first-person stories from the communities talk about why these spaces are important and not to be forgotten.”

The site launched in October and is still in development, but the project goes beyond just information about the Tongva, Chumash, and other Southern California indigenous communities.

Los Angeles has become home to American Indians from across the country, as well as indigenous peoples from Latin America and Pacific Island nations, who relocated here voluntarily or through displacement over many generations. Goeman said each of those communities has its own history within L.A.

“That’s something we wanted to get at: how do you begin to make a place? It’s not like when you get here you forget all your old world.”

Goeman said the researchers are happy to provide the platform and hope community members will come forward to tell their own stories.

The site illustrates those stories through interactive maps, timelines, digitized historical documents, links to other educational resources, and video interviews with community members. Goeman and her team said most of this information was publicly available before, but it has never been conveniently compiled in one place. The team hopes the website will become a trustworthy resource for information that has been vetted by the communities represented.

Goeman said a major goal of the Mapping indigenous L.A. project is to get across the idea that indigenous communities are not a thing of the past in California. In fact, census data shows the state has the highest number of residents with American Indian or Alaska Native heritage in the country—over 700,000.

“If you’re there being presented with a live, living person, it really gets past that stereotype that Indian people are dead or still dying,” Goeman said. “What people don’t realize is we’ve actually increased in numbers, and we’ve increased in knowledge and we’ve increased in the recovery of our languages through revitalization, and that’s kind of what we want to show, that vibrancy.”

Listen to this story on KPCC 

indigenousla Screen Shot 2016-04-19 at 4.39.27 PM