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Author Explores Hispano Culture
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| DR. ALVIN KORTE |
Alvin Korte has an interesting background primarily centered around
education and social work. He has bachelor’s degree from New Mexico Highlands
University where he majored in psychology and biology with coursework in
sociology. He received his masters in social work from Arizona State University
and completed a doctorate at the University of Denver. He also attended a year
of doctoral coursework at Washington University in St. Louis. He says he has had
many careers in social work.
“I was a school social worker in Phoenix and later
in Taos Municipal Schools. was I also a public welfare administrator charged
with everything from child welfare to food stamps and everything in
between.
He taught for 27
years at NMHU, and has conducted research in aging, developmental disabilities
and juvenile delinquency. He has long been an advocate for the elderly and a “…somewhat
lobbyist on housing in Washington."
After leaving the
university in 1999, he created the first domestic violence program in Las Vegas
in 2003, and continued with the program until 2011.
He now spends time
doing a genealogy and social study of one family of Bacas and Kortes. I am part of an effort to study some of the
German immigrant families in Mora in Territorial Days. He said he is also
studying corruption using matrix methods. Last year the Las Vegas City and Rough
Rider Memorial Museum published a booklet called Southwest Swastikas, which explains
the emblems usage in Native American and other cultures.
In the midst of
all that he wrote Nosotros, a book on
Northern New Mexico Hispanics, which was the primary topic of our on-air
discussion. The following is a summary of our discussion in Alvin’s own words.
Q&A With Alvin Korte:
WB: In what ways is your book, Nosotros,
A study of Everyday Meanings in Hispano New Mexico an academic exploration
of Hispano culture?
AK: Nosotros is an academic book in that it uses two theoretic
perspectives from Sociology. It takes as
its theoretical perspective the social philosophy of Alfred Schutz and the
ethnomethology of Reyes Ramos and others.
WB: What prompted you to write the book?
AK: Schutz was interested in the way people in everyday life made sense of
everyday life. Life is naturally occurring and never given any attention unless
conflict causes people to examine the “what’s going on” in this scene. Reyes
Ramos was also interested in the way persons in everyday life made sense of
their problematic events in their lives. He was an ethnomethologist (ethno
meaning folks not ethnics). One other academic besides Ramos in of course Dr.
Tomas Atencio. His idea is called resolano, the south side of the houses
where old men would collect to ponder the great questions of life. Atencio was
interested in collecting this wisdom which he called El Oro del Barrio from people in everyday life. It is academic in
that one uses the available literature to open these areas for study. I took
classes with Dr. David Franks at the University of Denver. He taught a really
crazy sociology class. Sometimes we didn’t
if we were coming or going. Dr. Clark Knowlton pushed many of us to study Hispanos
way after we had graduated. Both Knowlton and Franks were inspiring teachers. I
also hooked into the work of psychotherapist Dr. Rollo May to put these ideas
from Existential Phenomenology into use
for psychotherapy. I first posed the question of a book to Dr. Knowlton who
encouraged me to attempt such an undertaking. I found so much to write about. When
I used to have more freedom I taught seminars on this material. It always went
well. For many years we had to teach something about “cultural competence” but
the books that purportedly were about such competence really sucked.
WB: What
audience is the book written for?
AK: I think this book could be useful to people working with Hispanos in a
clinical setting but I’m not holding my breath. The book was used by a former
student in a cultural counseling class this summer. I don’t know if the book
was useful. I didn’t intend this book to be a social problems book. I worked
very hard to make the book useful for someone who needed to understand what she
or he might be up against, the nature of their problem but little about what do
you do about the problem. I just don’t think one can define a problem in terms
of its remediation.
As an example, the
whole idea behind Mancornado is to
describe what happens in situations where the old girlfriend is running around with a new guy
and this guy experiencing loss, anger stalking or in many cases lands up in
domestic violence class. Presenting the idea as I developed one guy said, “¡Eso me esta pasando a mi!” A lot of the material has applications in so
called mental health settings. I would hope that not only should academics read
the book, but others. I know of five anthropologists who are reading it
.
WB: What value is the book as a way to understand how
modern Hispano culture is influenced by present day society?
AK: There are huge inroads being made by American culture on Hispano belief
systems, values or language. Obviously if one no longer knows how to speak
Spanish then one is not in a position to understand some who have better understanding. We can’t
communicate with our compatriots. Recently one gal at Walmart in dealing with
an older customer apologized to him saying “Ya
se me acabo el espanol” (I ran out of Spanish.) Yet one sees elements of
culture being remembered, reconnected to its past. If re-membered then it isn’t
forgotten. Two weeks ago I saw en
entriega de novios. Not only was it well done but people in the party saw
something of how it was done in the past. This is a reviving of cultural
memory. Some of what we are--what we believe in--has a long history in Spain. The
first corrido was written in 1060. Of
course they were called romances. The corrido
is very versatile. Rosita Alveres is
a very old song written in 1910 and yet I still hear some of these songs New
Mexico.
WB: Talk about oral tradition. You include
a lot of poetry in the book, which gives a broader sense of the depth of
cultural expression.
AK: One of the chapters I didn’t want to write was the second chapter on the
oral tradition. The more I got into it the more I appreciated it as a source of
meaning. Dichos are highly developed
social knowledge. Dr. Aurelio Espinoza from Stanford was collecting dichos, refranes in 1916. I see where
they are republishing Dr. Sabine Ulibarri’s stories from Tierra Amarilla. I
heard some guys doing hip hop in Spanish. This group was from Milwaukee. I
thought at the time that the dicho
could be used as a hip hop to teach kids value lessons. It would fit so
nicely!
I covered a lot
of poetry that I found in a book by Drs. Anselmo Arrellano and Julian Vigil. It
is an awesome collection of historical events. There are poems about people
leaving Mora to go work as shepherds. One poem tells of the loneliness and
brutal dry summer sheepherding in 1932 in Wyoming. Others tell of the 120
Combat Engineers on their way to go fight in Italy in WWII. One gets the sense
of the meaning of these events. Additionally our oral tradition was used to
provide grieving families with support. Andelica Gallegos would write these recuerdos
for her neighbors in Taos.
WB: In the book you have a chapter on
mortification. What does that mean and what is its implication in Hispano
culture?
AK: We have to suspend what we believe or see in order to take a radical
position toward the phenomena we are considering. It is called rendering
reality strange (Natonson). I was
talking in class one time about family violence. An older gentleman asked me,
“Is that an example of mortificacion.”
Wow. It caused me to start an inquiry about mortification. It meant that
this fellow was creating a hell for his Mexican-origin wife. She was using this
word to describe what she was feeling. My folks used to say that my mentally
ill sister was a mortification for them (Esta
muchacha es pura mortificación, parece que nos pucieron una maldicion). Phenomenology
attempts to get to the essence of a thing.
The essence of mortification is an experience of the death of a self, as
an elderly couple in Questa said. “Junior’s drinking is pure mortificación for us.” They were saying
that because of Junior’s drinking they couldn’t be parents to him, support him
or give him counsel. They experienced this role as mortification. Schutz gave a
nice idea by calling these experiences as typifications. Mrs. Benitez typified
her situation as a mortificación. Hispanos
have many typifications. I set out to document these typifications on a variety
of everyday experiences. A woman dealing with a son-in-law who put a gun to her
head experienced mortification. One cannot act in these situations. If one
cannot act, meaning dies. This is mortification – a death of the self. This
idea the basis of depression, as Ernest Becker taught us.
WB: Talk a little about the chapter having
to do with shame, respect and joking around. I’ve been present when what
started out as a joke turns into a shouting match.
AK: Carria is a joking exchange and part of
the oral tradition. Every morning I hear it at the breakfast table when one of
the guys gets ribbed about something he did of failed to do. It is not
malicious just good natured ribbing. Carria
comes from the carriles (chin straps)
on soldiers’ helmets in Spain. Thus carria
in a slap on the face. Sometimes these games become vicious. In most cases this
goes on all the time where men are working. Cabula
is also an insult only it is so abstract that the person getting it is not
aware of being insulted. These are skilled philosophers plying their trade. One
guy who sold rocks for a living took on an engineer. All of us caught the line
he was playing out while the highly educated, credentialed engineer never got
it. True cabulla. Face is what we
present to the world, for others to uphold or deface. Face is also our cara.
Face has a public and a private component. If the private part can be reached
the face of the other can desecrate his or her value. We have a name for such persons who
disrespect. We call them descarado – literally
without face or unable to handle the face or “line” the other has presented in
the interaction.
WB: What was
the greatest challenge to writing the book?
AK: I suppose the biggest problem was taking phenomenology and
ethnomethodology as serious. I was trained in statistical and research
methodology. Phen and ethno methods advocate
a different approach to research. They value the descriptive and the
interpretive rather than the statistical, methodological based on the logical
positivist. Gertz, an anthropologist,
called it thick description. Some
people have dismissed it as philosophy or irrelevant. Next would be the innumerable
evaluations and re-writes. I’m sure there are bugs in the text. There were days
which turned into weeks when I didn’t feel like writing. Dead spots of
non-productivity when nothing productive or positive would occur. Writing is a
solitary endeavor. One has to be a fanatic to write. I imagine it is the same
problem in painting, or creating music.
WB: Did your
research change your perceptions about how Hispano culture has evolved?
AK: This is a difficult question to answer. This was not the goal of my
studies. My aim was to look at typifications and attempt of consider issues of
social interaction (inter-subjectivity), meaning (which is elusive), intentionality
of consciousness, and other ideas from Existential Phenomenology and as found
in the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. In
short I also wanted to see how these ideas might be useful beyond the work of
May and Becker. One of the ideas I added was the idea of a cultural history.
Nosotros, A study of Everyday Meanings in
Hispano New Mexico is available at Tome on the Range in Las Vegas, or at most online retailers.
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Jan. 8, Michael Hebler
From Blaize’s website: About the book Firefighter Down, District One: Life isn’t promised. When the tones go off you never know who needs you the most or even worst, who will you set your own life down for. My father was a captain who set his life down for me in a fire. Now it is my duty to find out how that fire started and who started it. The guy that killed my father didn’t just kill him in a normal way, he killed him with his worst nightmare. My father wasn’t killed by a gang shooting or an accident, he was killed in the most painful way this person knew how to kill my father. He unleashed the animal on him and myself. I am not talking about an animal like a wild or domestic animal, I am talking about the elemental animal, the one known as fire. 
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