Dr. Hilda Ontiveros and Dr. Jesse Soledad Arrieta

[00:01] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: Good morning. I'm Doctor Hilda Ontiveros Arrieta. I am 41 years old and today is February 1, 2023. I'm here at the University of Texas at El Paso with my interview partner, doctor Jesse Arrieta which happens to be my spouse and colleague at women's and gender studies here at UTEP.

[00:21] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: Good morning, I'm Doctor Jesse Arrieta. I'm 44 years old. Today's February 1, 2020, 2023. We're here at the University of Texas at El Paso. My interview partner is my wife, doctor Hilda Arrieta and she's also my colleague at women's studies. Hilda is also the mother of our children and best friend.

[00:48] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: So I'd like to ask you some questions in anticipation of Women's History Month here in the US, and in the spirit of inclusion excellence at UTEP and the US Mexico border. So, surprise, I'm going to be asking you some stuff about women's and gender studies. So tell me about your ethnic and labor roots in the community. And how do your roots in this community inform your teaching in a women's studies program on the US Mexico border?

[01:16] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: Okay, well, I'm a first generation college student, so I identify as Chicana. That's not a term that my parents would use or prefer. They would probably prefer the term Hispanic. But really we are native to this region and to this area. And I know that now for sure through ancestry DNA testing, that my family is from Chihuahua, Mexico, and has always kind of been in this border area. So growing up, that was something that was really, really subdued and just kind of not discussed at my house. When I came to UtEP as an undergrad, I always knew I wanted to go to college. I always knew I wanted to pursue higher education. But as a first generation student, I didn't really know what that meant. And so when I came here, I discovered mecha, right, as a student organization, which I found really fascinating. So I started to learn about my ethnic cultural history. And of course my parents thought that that wasn't the best, you know, route. When I decided that I wanted to become a chicano studies major, they were like, why would you want to do that? Right? Like, what kind of job are you going to get with that degree? I always knew I wanted to be a teacher, of course, but I didn't really know exactly how or what that was going to look like. And so looking into my own history, I knew that my grandmothers participated, of course, in labor and labor activism as single moms and as like, native to El Paso. But from an immigrant family. So my paternal grandmother, she worked at a sarco smelter here in town, which is no longer here, but she worked there in the 1940s during World War two, when my dad was about two, three, four years old. And so that was the job she took on as a, like Rosita de Riveter, right? During that time, we didn't discover this or I didn't discover it until she, she passed away. And she had a picture in her purse, in her grandma purse that she carried with her apparently all the time. And it had a picture, you know, all the women out in front of the office of the plant of the smelter, and they're all wearing jeans. They have their, you know, their hair up with the, like, typical Rosie the riveter look, bandana jean jacket, jeans, pants, right? They're wearing pants overalls. And so a couple years back, there was a news story on the local news about the women that worked at a sarco. And so she was in that picture. It was a feature of someone else's mother and grandmother. But my grandmother was in there. And so when I look at my maternal grandmothers, and this is all grandmothers, because there were no grandfathers in the picture on both sides of my family, it's only a story about grandmothers. My great grandmother and grandmother both worked as domestics, and my paternal grandmother as well. They all worked as domestics, taking on jobs, like watching other people's kids, you know, laundry, ironing, cooking, like just taking on odd jobs, which supplemented their livelihood. So that has always been kind of like the story. I did not know my great grandmother, but I know that she did work as a domestic in sunset heights for a jewish family. And these are just stories, right, that are passed on oral histories in the family where we always had cups and plates that had the star of David. And I never realized it until I was in college that, like those heirlooms, right? Those were our family heirlooms, were like cubs, plates, and things came from the family that she worked for. So, you know, there's not a lot of documentation about that, but it's just passed on story to story from, you know, my mother and her sister and my grandmother. So thinking about how that relates to my teaching, it's really amazing because we recently both finished our doctorates last year. I finished in August, and I graduated in December just a couple months ago. And so it informs my teaching, and it always has since I started teaching at the university 20 years ago. It's always been something that I want to highlight in my classes, because it's important for students not only to see themselves in their professor, but to see their family history and their family stories as important and as part of history. So in my classes, I've always had historiography or, like, an oral history project where they go home and start asking these really important questions to their grandparents, if they're still alive, to their parents, aunts, uncles, gonfather, you know, whoever, to see, like, what kind of stories are there that their families have but maybe don't talk about, and how we can really center that and make sure that that is important and it's recorded, even if it's just in their own families, like, having the students write a paper of ten questions that you're going to ask your grandma, your grandpa, or whoever in your family, so that it is recorded somehow and they can start to look at why it's important to deconstruct, right, the narratives that we've been taught and be their own historian and make sure that their stories are heard of and talked about.

[07:25] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: Something that I think is important. So important about what you're saying and how it informs your teaching is that oftentimes we experience the silencing of history, especially when in relation to Latinos, Latinx people, and women, women's history. And so the fact that you're implementing this silenced history that you didn't learn about until later, for example, the heirlooms with the Star of David, but that you're taking it to another level by helping your students unsilence these histories. And I was thinking about this as you were mentioning Rosie the Riveter, and we always hear about it as Rosie the Riveter, but we never think that mexican american women or mexican origin women or all types of women from different racial and ethnic backgrounds took the place of male workers during World War two. And again, going back to the silenced history, until Fox News here in town did a special on the women of Osarco. Do many of us realize that women had. Mexican american women had a huge role in the functioning of El Paso, especially during this era? They would make wartime uniforms at Fada and Levi's because we were the manufacturing capital of the world or the garment industry capital of the world. I know for a fact that my grandmother, Hilda Beard, was a garment worker, and she was sewing some of these military uniforms to send off to Europe, you know, for american soldiers. So that's. I think that's super interesting that you point that out.

[09:22] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: Yeah. Farah did get the contract to make the uniforms during World War two, which was really important because that was the largest employer here in town for many decades, many years, it was the largest employer. My uncle also worked there, like, decades later. Right. In the 1960s and seventies, for sure. You know, women's labor has always been there. Whether we've talked about it or documented or not, it's always been there, and it's always going to be there. Right. When we talk about what does women's labor look like now? It's all about the paid and unpaid labor that we do. Every single silent labor, the silent labor, the double duty, you know, all of that. But also looking at the fact that when I remember it, when I think about it, that this is, like, happening in Spanish, right? Like, in my mind, I think because for my parents, they experienced linguistic violence at school where they were not allowed to speak Spanish, and they were hit and punished, like, physically punished for speaking Spanish. So when we think about that, I always bring that up to my classes as well. Like, if they have anyone in their family that they want to ask. Now we're pushing dual language and, you know, triple languages at school, but at that time, you were literally not allowed to speak Spanish. So I didn't learn Spanish at home. I had to learn Spanish at school, which took me, like, 20 years. And so in looking at what I said, started the conversation with, like, Chicano studies and what that means, it was a whole process for me of, like, going back to the root language, the home language, which. And it wasn't their fault. Like, I don't blame them for that. I understand why they didn't want me to speak Spanish, but it ended up harming more than helping for our generation. And so now you and I are really all about making sure that our children are multilingual so they don't have to struggle, right. If they.

[11:36] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: And they know Spanish accurately, they know.

[11:38] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: It better than we do, unlike the.

[11:40] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: Pocho status that we. That we have.

[11:43] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: And I was definitely called that at home, you know, like, other derogatory terms, too. But that also, I think, helped foster some of our success in school so that we wouldn't be labeled. Right. Because unfortunately, we still have that stigma at school. And as a teacher, you know, I can attest to that. Anybody that has any kind of accent is already going to be labeled and tested and, you know, kind of put through all kinds of battery tests to make sure that they understand the language correctly. But that's a whole other. That's a whole other topic.

[12:26] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: So I have similar roots in the community that inform my teaching. So my parents, you know, they're an immigrant family from Mexico and other parts of Latin America to the United States, to this region, and of course from Chihuahua. And I was surprised to learn as a Chicano studies student here at UTEP, I was a microbiology and a Chicano studies student. I thought that having that firm grasp of the region, the history of the region and the history of its people would make me a better doctor, a better physician. So much to the dismay of my parents, that's what I did. I studied Chicano studies with microbiology and chemistry. But it isn't until I took those courses, and until I took women's studies courses here at the university that I asked my parents and my aunts and uncles, and then they told me these stories. They told me these stories that I was never privy to that were unknown. So here I was studying the United Farmworkers union in the 1960s and the feminist movement of the chicana feminist movement and the black feminist movement of the 1960s and seventies without knowing that I really had a history in these movements. And so I have grown attached to them because of that. I do teach a course on the sixties and seventies civil rights movement, feminist civil rights movement. And that's informed what I put into that classroom. So I found out, you know, through asking my parents, because of certain assignments in chicano studies and women's studies, that my dad was a farm worker as a teenager, actually in middle school. So he was a preteen. He would jump on trains. His mom was a single mom. His dad went off and had a family with someone else at the same time. So he would jump on these trains near smelter town here in Texas. He would catch the train right across the street from UTEP and take himself, ride himself to New Mexico, to California, other parts of the country as a kid that should have been in middle school, you know, studying in the classroom or doing something else during the summer. And he would pick chilis, he would pick onions, bring the money back to his parents, to his mom, actually, not his parents, his mom, to help her, because he saw her struggle. She was in the garment industry. But of course, she was trying to raise four boys on her own and work at the wrangler and the Levi's factory and at Fada too at some point. And it wasn't enough, of course, when you're feeding and raising four boys. So he went off and did that. And then while talking to my mom and my aunt, my maternal aunt, they talked to me about how my uncle was born on the actual beet field in Montana. You know, I knew that they would pick fruit and vegetables, and they were farm workers, but it was a whole other connection to that story when they told me that my uncle was born on the dirt floor because my grandmother was working on an active labor. She was picking beets on inactive labor, and he was born there on the floor. And then she had lost two other infants to malnutrition. They were born the same way on the fields, and they died either because it was too cold or because she couldn't produce milk to feed them. And they eventually passed away a few weeks later of malnutrition. And so I take this history with me when I teach, you know, about Dolores Huerta and the farmworkers movement, about Angela Davis and the black feminist movement. It informs every aspect of who I am in my role as the director of women's studies and in my role as a yemenite, you know, as a teacher of youth here in El Paso. And it's so important that the students see themselves in their professors and in their teachers. And I feel that I'm able to make these deep connections with my students, and I'm sure you are, too, because of these roots that we have in the community. They can see themselves in our stories, in our history. But going back to teaching ethnic studies and ethnicity and labor roots in the community, you have an ethnic studies background. You told me a little bit about your studies in chicano studies. How do you weave that into inclusion? What does inclusion really mean to you in terms of teaching in public schools and the university and our inclusion excellence as mentioned in our 2030 strategic plan here at UTEP? Like, how do you weave all that together? How does it make sense to you?

[18:02] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: So I think it's important what you're saying to share those kinds of stories in the classroom. It's really different now that, for instance, at the university, I teach online, and so I don't have that, like, real life connection with students. So it's a little bit more difficult to try to create that connection and to get them to think deeply. Like, as we would have a conversation in the class, it would be maybe a lot more light bulbs going off, right? But in this way, at this moment in time, at this historical moment, there is the anti CRT movement. Right. Critical race theory, which is not what is taught in high school whatsoever. But there's, you know, some teachers who are afraid to talk about ethnic studies topics or, you know, to try to center these subaltern histories. But for me, you know, it's something that I've always done, and I make sure that all students understand that wherever they're from, whoever they are, whatever their identity is, their family histories, like, all of that is history, and it is important, and it is at the center of everything that we do. And so I try to get them to think in a different way instead of just the narrative that we have been taught, that we've learned and that we continue to perpetuate, to try to put that aside and think about what is important to them. And so whatever that is, whatever name they want to be called, whatever they're interested in, as far as, you know, looking at themselves, to being reflective, that's what I try to focus on in the classroom. So that could be a language difference that even includes brain differences, right. That we have so much more knowledge now about autism, for example, and how to include students in the classroom who are autistic, right. They're on the spectrum where previously maybe that didn't happen. You know, somebody who's an english language learner, for instance, having them highlight their language, whatever it is, you know, so other students can hear and see. It's not a deficit, it's a strength. And they're growing and learning like everybody else. So in my classroom, I really try to focus on making sure that we're reflective of ourselves, but that we also are learning about other people. So I try to highlight, like, whoever's in the class at that point asking them, what is their background? Like, what is their family background? Where are your parents from? And where are your grandparents from? So it's always a little project that we do on identity. What do you call yourself? Like, what is your privilege? That's also an important one. Like, what privilege do we have? So for us, you and I sitting here, we are extremely privileged, and we have a totally different life than our parents or grandparents could have ever probably imagined that. Sorry. It's okay. That their descendants would have. I have a lot of gratitude to them for their perseverance, right. For going through all that they went through so that we could be here, so that we could teach at a university that is 85% Hispanic. Right. So that we as women, women of color, can be in those classrooms and can be talking about these things that we, you and I, actually didn't get to experience as students here. I didn't see myself in a lot of classrooms.

[21:53] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: Right.

[21:53] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: My professors were not exactly reflective of me and my identity and being a first gen student or being here from El Paso. Right.

[22:03] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: Or even being Latino.

[22:05] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: Or even being Latino. Exactly. Latino. Chicano, whatever it is. Like, we had very few experiences like that. So I'm really cognizant of that. Whether I'm in a high school classroom, a middle school classroom, if I'm here on campus to make sure that we recognize and acknowledge that that is a huge, very important role and responsibility that we have to ourselves, to our family, right, but also, like, to our community. And so when we think about teaching in itself, you know, I think both of us have dedicated ourselves and our lives and our studies. Everything that I researched in my dissertation is about inclusion and making sure that we are culturally relevant, that we are representing not just ourselves in our own group, but, like, all the similarities that we have amongst each other. Because there's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world right now where I don't want students or even our own children to think that that's normal or that that should ever, ever happen. But it's getting difficult, you know, to. To see it and also to try to combat that in the classroom, whether it's an online class or, you know, an in person class. I really long for the in person, but I know that that's not the trajectory of education anymore. We're going now online, and we have to figure out how to adapt and how to maintain our values as educators of whatever it is. Ethnic studies, history, women's studies, all of those things are one to me. But if we're thinking about how do we contribute to inclusion and excellence here at the university, it has to be more than lip service, it has to be real, it has to be praxis. It has to include everybody, no matter what. Not just token, token individuals. I have felt tokenized, of course, before in education. And so we have to be really also aware that we don't replicate that for anyone.

[24:24] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: Yes, and that brings up the important question for me anyway, and I ask myself this on the daily, how do we do inclusion? Not just what does it mean to be inclusive, but how do we do this? How do we actively do inclusion in a university setting, in a k twelve setting? Because so important to me, even before it was part of our strategic plan for 2030, the inclusion excellence. I've always thought that women's and gender studies is at the helm of that ship. We are inclusion excellence. Thanks to my predecessors, the directors that were in my position before I even started teaching, we are like that prime example of inclusion excellence. And I have to hand it to Doctor Natalisio, our former president, and Doctor Wilson, our current president, for pushing us in that direction. I think about Doctor Natalisio every day and how a big reason why we're here at the university as spouses, teaching women's and gender studies, Latina, mexican american, immigrant background, farmworker, domestic worker, roots at the front of a classroom, teaching and even directing a program. This is not possible in many other places across the country or the globe, for that matter. And so I think about that every day. I don't take it for granted at any point throughout the day, do I take my existence at this university for granted. As a matter of fact, I find myself while I'm driving to work, I turn around and I look at Acarco, where my dad worked for so many years. And then they lived across the street, right against the river in smelter town, where they didn't have running water, they did not have toilets, they did not have food. A lot of times they had, they experienced lead poisoning, heavy metal poisoning, cancer clusters in my entire family. Their babies were born on the floor in the middle of a living room, in a little shack. And here I am driving to UTep every morning, and our existence could have been so different, and, you know, our reality could have been so different. And I just. I think about, like, that giant leap from smelter town and Asarco to the university. It's really eyes distance. We look out any window at the university. It's my parents old neighborhood, right, against Ciudad Juarez. It was a colonia, not even a colonia. A colonia is a step up from how they used to live in Smeltertown and work at a sarco. And to me, like to look out the window, my office window at a university, and to see that and to think about aunts and uncles that were born on the field and didn't get a chance to live. But now we're here, and I never take that for granted. Like you said, not for a second. Not for a second. And I think that the stories that we have, surely we're not the only ones, right? They're beautiful stories. And I think that students here at this hispanic serving institute can really identify with that. By definition of HSI, I would say that most of them identify with our story. And I feel that we could attribute a lot of our success here at the university to those ties that we have to our students.

[28:29] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: Right? I do want to say that, you know, every step of the way to get to this point was a struggle. It was not easy by any means. Like, literally from the first day of college till the last day of my doctorate, my whole entire life, right. That I've been studying, it was a struggle. And being a first gen student, I had no idea how to navigate the university. Like, I had no clue. My parents couldn't even help me with homework, like, in elementary school. Right. Like, I feel like I did this on my own, but from their example of their hard work and their perseverance and that, like, there's no option. Like, you cannot give up. You have to finish whatever it is that you want to do. Right. They didn't know what it would look like, and I didn't know either. But the conversation was always, you're going to go to college, and so, okay, like, yeah, that's great. That's awesome. But what does that mean? What does that look like? How much does it cost? Like, you know, how do you do it? So when you're talking about, how do we do inclusion, I really think we need to do a much better job of helping students, whatever their background, right. Helping students get to their goal, whatever that goal is, whether it's here or, you know, not even at the university, but out there, not within these confines. Right. And there's a lot of things, I think, that could have been done to help, but it was brutal. I feel like, hopefully, that we've gone through all of this and we've had these experiences, it will be easier for the next generation, for our students and for our children. That's my hope, right, that we've learned those lessons and we can implement all kinds of things here at the university or in the school districts, whatever it is in the community, to help people overcome the obstacles that a lot of them are the same as the ones that our family members have had to struggle with. Right. Sexism, racism.

[30:46] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: Hunger.

[30:47] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: Hunger. Yeah. We know that's an issue for students.

[30:52] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: It was an issue for me. I started my university career out of town, so I wasn't anywhere near my parents, and I had just come out as lesbian to my parents. So then I experienced that being estranged from my family. And I remember being hungry in college, and had I not known someone that worked at Taco Bell, I think that on many occasions, I wouldn't have had anything to eat because my friend at Taco Bell, she was a manager at Taco Bell, I met her in college. She would give me free food because she knew I didn't have anything to eat, and I didn't have money, like, the last two weeks of the month, or let's just say halfway through the month, because it's two weeks. And I thought about that as I walked across the stage with my doctoral degree. That was a long way from being hungry in the middle of a city that I didn't know very well, which is Fort Worth, and not being able to ask anyone for help, but literally was like, a friend that I had met that happened to be a manager at Taco Bell. And that may be the reason why I really don't want to eat Taco Bell anymore. And our kids love it, and I find that very interesting. I've never told them that story, but, you know, I'm glad that they love it. Thank you, Taco Bell.

[32:19] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: I did not know that story either.

[32:21] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: Thank you for feeding me Taco Bell, but I cannot have any more.

[32:27] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: Yeah.

[32:28] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: And I think that all these things just, you know, these aspects of our story, you know, our children are never going to be able to identify with them. Hopefully.

[32:42] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: I mean, we hope, right. But I think it's important for them to know that, you know, for example, like, both of our dads, right, there are in a union, a labor union, and sometimes the union went on strike. I know your dad also had points in time when we were students, and in elementary, middle, high school, college went on strike.

[33:03] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: No paycheck for three months.

[33:05] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: No paycheck for whoever knows how long. And so the thing at home was like, you never cross a picket line. Right? Never cross the picket line. And whatever we have to do to survive, that's what we're gonna do. If we eat dried potatoes, then that's what we eat. You need to accept that, and you need to deal with that. Right.

[33:23] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: Because it'll make things better.

[33:25] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: Right. For the workers. Right. And, like, making sure that our dads, which I think because they were part of a labor union, that's why we went to college. That's why we had the opportunity to go to college in the first place, because they had those jobs and they had organized as laborers. So I know that for a fact. That's the reason that I went to college. Otherwise, I may note, I have even considered, right, going if it wasn't for that trajectory. So, yeah, our kids would never. Hopefully never have to struggle the way that we did. That's the goal. But always going back and humbling, humbling ourselves and thinking about all those that came before us and having that gratitude for their sacrifices so that we could be sitting here today talking about the fact that we, in our forties, finished a doctorate.

[34:26] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: Gratitude, that's like the word of my life. Yeah, that's. You know, if I've learned anything at the age of 41, it's like gratitude. That's something we have to carry with us forever, is gratitude. And I'm so happy that we're sitting here talking to one another and that we share four children together and that we have similar perspectives and similar roots in the community. I think it's so important. And, you know, I think that we're going to grow even better together because of this. And we're able to fortify our women's and gender studies program and what other program will be put in charge of at this university because of our struggles.

[35:14] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: Absolutely.

[35:16] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: So the struggles are for nothing. They're not, they're, I mean, they're not for nothing. They're valuable. Those are our learning points, is what I believe when we struggle is when we learn and we learn how to lead. My struggles have formed me, has shaped my leadership.

[35:38] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: Absolutely. And I think we carry the struggles of our parents and grandparents and great grandparents, like, whether we realize it or not, we carry that with us. And that's our perseverance to continue, even if it's hard. Right. And I hope that we help other people in our community learn about their own families and their own history and their own struggles that they carry within them, whether they realize it or nothing. So we are of service to this university and to this community as educators, as Chicana, Latina, you know, first Gen, all of those identifying things as women, as queer women.

[36:24] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: And that's so important to an HSI, a hispanic serving institute, because we can't only say whether we're a hispanic serving institute, but how are we going to serve? What does serving us look like? I think this is what it looks like. It looks like you and I. It looks like what we do on a daily basis and what many others on this campus do.

[36:43] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: Absolutely. This is not just a job. Yeah. It's really intertwined with our life and with our community. And I hope that we can strengthen those community links and partnerships and have the university be of service to the community as well, not just to itself. But that's, I think the first step in serving us is making sure that we have those links to our community, that we are practicing practices. So hopefully you and I can foster that and strengthen that and continue that for many years, many years to come.

[37:25] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: Well, thank you so much for sharing this moment with me. I know you had to take time off of your high school teaching gig.

[37:34] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: Yes.

[37:36] DR. HILDA ONTIVEROS ARRIETA: To be here at your higher Ed gig.

[37:39] DR. JESSE SOLEDAD ARRIETA: Thank you for inviting me. I think this is a really important conversation and I'm really proud to be part of the department, the program and to be your wife and partner and spouse and to work on these things that we value so much together. So thank you. It's a.