Hiaki Presentation - University of Arizona - October 27th

[Susan Penfield]

For all those in the Tucson Area -- Please come to --This is the first in a
series of lectures for recipients of Confluence Center grants (for
interdisciplinary research).

This Thursday, from 3-5 pm, in the main gallery at the U of AZ Museum of
Art, Maria Florez Leyva and I will be presenting some of the results
from an AHSS (Confluence Center) grant we received last year.

About 30-35 years ago, Mrs. Leyva conducted a number of interviews in
Sonora and Tucson with elderly Yaqui who had had personal experience of
the warfare, persecution, deportation and oppression of the Yaqui in the
early part of the last century, 1900-1930ish. The interviewees were
young people and children during those events, and described their
experiences and those of their families. She recorded the interviews on
an inexpensive cassette recorder, and the resulting cassettes sat in her
drawers at home for the next 30 years. Sometimes she would try to listen
and transcribe them, but the poor sound quality of the recording and
deteriorating condition of the tapes made it impossible.

She mentioned those tapes to me a few years ago, and two years ago Bill
Beezley (of the History department) and I got a grant from the AHSS
grant initiative, now the Confluence Center, to digitally remaster
them, and transcribe and translate them. That work is now finished, and
we're starting to take stock and plan analyses of the material. It's a
fantastic treasure trove, an incredible first person account of those
events from the Hiaki perspective. There are accounts of surviving in
the mountains by the Rio Yaqui in Sonora, accounts of deportation to
the Yucatan and years of living in the south with other conscript
labor, and accounts of return to Yaqui terrritory. There are a lot of
very affecting and interesting details: what women would do who had to
deliver an infant in the bush; what conditions were like on ships going
south to the Yucatan, etc.

They are also a phenomenal corpus, from a linguistic point of view, of
natural Hiaki conversational data. The Hiaki interviews, before
translation, comprise about 35000 words; more or less double that with
the English translation.

We'll be giving an overview of the project at the THursday presentation,
and would be thrilled to get any feedback or suggestions from any or all
of you -- come one, come all!
-- 
**********************************************************************************************
*Susan D. Penfield, Ph.D.
*
Research Coordinator,
CERCLL,  Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy
CONFLUENCE, Center for Creative Inquiry
University of Arizona
Phone: (520) 626-8071
Fax: (520) 626-3313
Website: cercll.arizona.edu
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