Historian Julie Weise’s grant will transform a podcast into a YouTube series

Editor’s Note: Julie Weise is a CLLAS affiliated faculty member. This article originated in Around the O.

Around the O, March 2, 2020—Julie Weise, an associate professor of history, has been awarded a $50,000 public-engagement grant to take her Nuestro South project to the next level, building on a successful podcast series to create a five-part YouTube series.

The YouTube series will showcase the long history of Latinx life in the Deep South, celebrating 100 years of Latinx culture and contributions in the region. The grant was awarded by the Whiting Foundation.

Weise’s work will build on a previous seed grant she received in 2018, also from the Whiting Foundation, which was matched by the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. She used the funding to collaborate with a team of media-savvy Latinx community leaders and college students to create the Nuestro South podcast.

The podcast filters historical scholarship on Latinx people in the South through the lens of youth who are discovering and celebrating their roots in the region. 

“This new dimension in my career has been unexpected and wonderful as I work with brilliant partners to provide the region’s Latinx youth an opportunity to discover the histories of their forebears,” Weise said.

Phil Scher, divisional dean for social science in the College of Arts and Sciences, said the award stands out because it helps make research accessible to the general public.

“Professor Weise has achieved something important for any scholar: She has been able to take her academic research and scholarship to new audiences outside of the academy,” he said. “The Whiting is a wonderful acknowledgement of the kind of exemplary public engagement we value so deeply at the University of Oregon.”

Weise said that for the hundreds of thousands of Latinx youth living in the Deep South, many of whom are children of immigrants who settled during a wave of migration in the 1990s, it can be challenging to understand how they fit into the standard schoolbook history of a black-and-white South. Yet, the history of Southern Latinx communities dates back more than a century.

Her 2015 book, “Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910,” pioneered scholarship on this under-studied subject, illuminating the lives of Mexican merchants and laborers in interwar New Orleans, Mexican sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, bracero guest workers in Arkansas, migrant workers in rural Georgia and immigrant settlement in the exurbs of Charlotte in the 1990s. 

After her book was published, Weise did some radio interviews in the South. Among those who heard her was Erik Valera, a nonprofit leader and community activist in North Carolina. Valera reached out to Weise to say that he felt the stories and insight she presented were very important and that he wanted to explore how to make them accessible to others in the community.

“He said he wanted to see the histories from my book on the smartphone of every Latinx young person in the South,” Weise recalls. “As you can imagine, I pretty much fell off my couch. He had faith that the community really cared about this history, and he was right.”

This was the origin of the podcast and now the YouTube series.

With the new Whiting award, Weise and her collaborators will take an extended road trip around the South to shoot and edit the YouTube series. In each stop on their trip, college student hosts will interview Southerners about their and their families’ connection to local Latinx history, retell the stories of Mexican immigration to the area, and engage local young people in conversations about the past.

“The video series and accompanying social media engagement will give Latinx youth a platform to explore their identities, shape their narrative of belonging and see reflections of themselves in historical figures who worked, raised families and fought for justice in the U.S. South,” Weise said.

The Whiting Public Engagement Program is a national grant founded to champion the public humanities in all its forms and to highlight the roles scholars play in using the humanities to advance communities around the country. Weise’s grant was one of 14 awarded to scholars who are tackling pressing challenges in communities.

“The judges were deeply impressed with the way Dr. Weise has developed the Nuestro South collaboration,” said Daniel Reid, executive director of the Whiting Foundation. “They see her proposed next steps as a model for how to bring fresh scholarship to a public who will not only be interested but will be transformed by it.”

—By Lisa Raleigh, College of Arts and Sciences

Tags: Julie Weise, Latinx life Deep South, UO

Panel Discussion — Immigrants out, “Guestworkers” in: A Hidden History of the Trump Years

April 24, 2019
4:00 pm	to	5:30 pm

Gerlinger Lounge, 1468 University St.
Passover-friendly refreshments will be served

Organized by Julie Weise, 2018-19 Wayne Morse Resident Scholar

In the United States and across Europe, nation-states are slamming their doors on immigrants and refugees. This nationalist reaction to the diversity that globalization has brought seems to portend depressed immigration levels for the foreseeable future. Yet employers still demand immigrant labor in a growing economy. Even as U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies drove undocumented workers deeper into the shadows, his administration also approved a record-breaking quarter-million temporary agricultural worker visas, known as H2A or “guestworkers.” Similar patterns are in effect around the globe.

In this panel, historians join key Oregon advocates for both agricultural and workers’ interests to contextualize the “guestworker” phenomenon locally and globally, and ask whether it represents the future of immigrant labor in the United States and beyond.

Panelists

Michael Dale is the founder and executive director of the Northwest Workers’ Justice Project, and non-profit law firm that represents low wage, immigrant and contingent workers with respect to civil employment law problems.  He worked for 25 years as an Oregon legal aid attorney, and helped establish the Oregon Law Center in 1995.  Over the last ten years he has been engaged in extensive litigation over the rules governing the use of H-2B temporary workers, winning cases in the 3rd, 11th and 4th Circuit Courts of Appeals.

Christoph Rass is one of Germany’s leading historians of twentieth-century European labor migration. A professor at Osnabrück University’s Institute for Migration and Intercultural Studies, Rass concentrates on institutions and knowledge production in migration regimes, forced migrations, and GIS-based modeling of migration patterns. Rass is a recent recipient of the Kalliope Prize for Migration Research from the German Emigration Center.

Jeff Stone is the CEO of Oregon Association of Nurseries and formerly Chief of Staff to Metro Council. Stone has a BS from the UO in political science and has deep experience in Oregon and national political affairs. He has served as an executive and board member of numerous business and nonprofit organizations.

Julie M. Weise is a scholar of twentieth-century Mexican migration history in global context. An associate professor of history at the University of Oregon, Weise is the author of the prize-winning Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 (UNC Press, 2015). Her current book project, “Citizenship Displaced: Migrant Political Cultures in the Era of State Control,” places postwar Mexican migration history in conversation with parallel histories in Europe and southern Africa.

Cosponsored by the UO Office of International Affairs, the UO Department of History, and the Global Studies Institute’s Global Oregon Faculty Collaboration Fund. Part of the Wayne Morse Center’s 2017-19 theme, Borders, Migration, and Belonging. The Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics encourages civic engagement and inspires enlightened dialogue by bringing students, scholars, activists, policymakers, and communities together to discuss issues affecting Oregon, our nation, and the world. 

Tags: Christoph Rass, Farmwokers, Julie Weise, Michael Dale, Trump era, UO, Wayne Morse Center

Julie Weise Wins 2016 Merle Curti Award for Best Book in U.S. Social History

Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South Since 1910, written by UO assistant professor of history Julie Weise and published by University of North Carolina Press, has been chosen to receive this year’s Merle Curti Award for Best Book in U.S. Social History from the Organization of American Historians.

Corazón de Dixie also received an Honorable Mention for the Theodore Saloutos Award for best book in immigration history from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

Professor Weise is an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies (CLLAS). For more about her book, see: http://cllas.uoregon.edu/6369-2/

Tags: CLLAS, Corazon de Dixie, History, Julie Weise, UO

Julie Weise, “Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the US South since 1910”

February 19, 2016
3:00 pm	to	4:30 pm

McKenzie Hall 375
University of Oregon

A conversation between author Julie Weise, UO assistant professor of history, and Natalia Molina, professor of history and associate vice chancellor, UC San Diego.

Julie Weise is an affiliated faculty member of CLLAS. Her new book, Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 (University of North Carolina Press), was published with support provided by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas; David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History.

In addition to discussing the book, Weise will share her experiences working with the UO Libraries Digital Scholarship Center (DSC) on a companion teaching website, corazondedixie.org, and DSC staffers will be on hand to answer faculty questions about possible future collaborations. Refreshments will be served.  For more information, see flier linked here.

CLLAS is cosponsoring this event.

Tags: CLLAS, Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910, Julie Weise, UO