In RESILIENCE: NAVIGATING CHALLENGES OF MODERN LIFE
(FIELDING MONOGRAPH, 2019; SONNET & CORLEY, EDS.)
CHAPTER 6
CRUZANDO PUENTES / CROSSING BRIDGES:
BUILDING RESILIENCE THROUGH COMMUNITAS
Connie Corley, PhD; David Blake Willis, PhD;
Diyana Dobberteen, MA; and Eliza von Baeyer, MA
School of Leadership Studies, Fielding Graduate University
Abstract
A cross-disciplinary, multi-university research team comprised of faculty and students from Fielding Graduate University, California State University Los Angeles, and representatives of community partner sites created an opportunity for experiential learning. This scholarship and fieldwork, which highlighted the resilience of a Los Angeles community, were supported through Fielding Graduate University’s Social Transformation Project. For over three years, the project provided a laboratory for dialogues across cultures, generations, and institutions/organizations. The research question guiding this case study was: “How can a community of practice integrate academic and service settings to promote intergenerational and intercultural mentoring?” The results of this living learning laboratory were something far more than we expected: a vibrant community of practice. We discovered that this temporary community had its own life, culminating in building close personal bonds between participants through sharing stories of resilience. Through communitas, community resilience was fostered in which seeds of change could be incubated and allowed to flourish.
Keywords: Resilience, community of practice, social transformation, case study, cultural identity, social identity, communitas, intergenerational engagement, visual ethnography
Introduction
In this chapter, the process and outcomes of a multi-year initiative we titled Cruzando Puentes (“Crossing Bridges”) are presented as they unfolded. The seed was planted when Connie Corley envisioned bringing people together from her two academic affiliations with elders in a retirement home in the larger community of Boyle Heights, an area adjacent to downtown Los Angeles that is rich in history and culture. This work led to engaging with another organization that had emerged from Boyle Heights to counteract the impact of gang violence in the 1990s. Stories of resilience are a thread weaving together this intergenerational/intercultural project that evolved over three years and engaged people of diverse backgrounds in a community of practice.
We first describe Cruzando Puentes as a community of practice, discussing resilience and its enhancement through storytelling, focusing on the impact of stories of resilience. Connections we catalyzed between participants revealed communitas in each of the three project phases. To reflect on the cultures and resilience that we experienced in Boyle Heights and Los Angeles, we also incorporate images of these communities and connections using visual ethnography.
Cruzando Puentes: Crossing Bridges, Engaging Communities
Cruzando Puentes (“Crossing Bridges” in Spanish) was the name given to collaborative research and a learning laboratory that emerged when funding became available to launch a Social Transformation Project through Fielding Graduate University’s Institute for Social Innovation in 2015. The first author, Connie Corley, partnered with David Blake Willis and other faculty, students, and alumni from Fielding to engage with faculty and students from California State University Los Angeles (CSULA) and others to form what Etienne Wenger and others have called a community of practice (2000) in the Boyle Heights community east of downtown Los Angeles in conjunction with Hollenbeck Palms Retirement Community and Homeboy Industries.
The primary emphasis of Cruzando Puentes was to support the resilience of individuals within a community. Wenger has characterized a community of practice as a joint enterprise in which members are mutually engaged and produce a shared repertoire of resources (2000). Unlike some communities of practice in which members have regular processes like standing meetings, Cruzando Puentes created specific opportunities for engagement in each of its three phases, which are described further below.
Our Cruzando Puentes community of practice incorporated seven design principles from Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge: 1) design for evolution, 2) open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives, 3) invite different levels of participation, 4) develop both public and private community spaces, 5) focus on value, 6) combine the familiar with excitement, and 7) create a rhythm for the community (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002). Attending to what we saw as “how to design for aliveness” was a key in creating and nurturing our community of practice as one that was appropriate to the cultures of Los Angeles, California.
The ethnographic stories that follow of personal survival and resilience, of elders as well as former gang members, merge together with co-inquiry in the spirit of what anthropologists Victor Turner and Edith Turner have called communitas (1974, 2012). Essentially this is an unstructured state in which all members of a community are equal, allowing them to share a common experience. In each phase of the project, experiences and interactions in community created communitas, transient states of meaningful exchange which occur through formal or informal rituals such as the sharing of meals (Turner, 2008, in Napier, 2016). Consciously welcoming interaction between individuals who might not typically connect was part of the overall process, and through communitas, meaningful stories were shared. The stories of resilience presented here reinforced the resilience of our community of practice and the community members. Central to adaptation is the importance of relationships including family and friendships, although in communitas even shorter encounters can elicit an adaptive response or affirmation of adaptation to previously adverse conditions in life. As Turner has noted, “Communitas can only be properly conveyed through stories” (2012, p. 1).
Enhancing Resilience Through Storytelling in the Context of Communitas
Resilience has been examined and defined in a broad range of contexts but here resilience is considered as both an adaptive response to adversity and seen in the context of maintaining competence across the lifespan (Greene, 2014). Resilient people share “…the ability to tell their stories to an interested and empathic listener in a safe space, especially to someone who has been there and understands” (Konvisser, 2016, p. 17). For those who have suffered trauma, they can integrate painful emotions and make them part of their story to continue living in a productive way (Konvisser, 2016). Stories are evidence of personal meaning (Polkinghorne, 2007), and storytelling enhances the resilience of listeners as well as tellers of stories (East, Jackson, O’Brienn, & Peters, 2010). By reflecting on the personal stories of others, understanding and insight can be gained into “…how others have overcome and worked through their adversity and hardship, and how we can incorporate these insights into our lives and experiences.” (East et al., 2010 p. 21).
The earliest roots of Cruzando Puentes began with Connie Corley, when she joined a study of Holocaust survivors in California which ended in a culminating public education event at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust called “Holocaust Survivors: Stories of Resilience” featuring the art of three Hungarian survivors, and two members of the study shared their life stories. Later on, the survivors met with university students from CSULA and Fielding to continue reflecting on the devastation in Hungary during World War II and how their art reflected some of these experiences. A model called Experience, Expression, Engagement (3E) was formulated (Corley, 2010), leading to a conceptualization of Cruzando Puentes, a project in which members of the community of practice share experiences and various forms of aesthetic and academic expression (e.g., academic assignments, poetry readings, visual ethnography). Later on, participants of Cruzando Puentes presented the stories to wider audiences who are similarly engaged in community research (e.g., for members of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Philadelphia through a Symposium on Boyle Heights in Spring 2018).
In communitas, events bring people together for experiences that include storytelling and other powerful ways of expanding knowledge of adverse life circumstances and how resilience can emerge. The outcome of communitas, when stories of resilience are shared, is that resilience of the individuals who have engaged in dialog is fostered. The resilience of the communities in which these members live grows as they are connected to other community members. A sense of the larger whole and sharing common concerns are further reinforced through these experiences.
Reinforcing Resilience in Communities
Community institutions such as universities can contribute to resilience among their members and also to sustaining the institutions at large (Greene & Dubus, 2017). The broader range of resilience of communities, for example the neighborhood/region in which a university is located, is also key. While a predominant focus on resilience in communities has targeted disaster preparation and response as in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Resilient Cities initiative (Rockefeller Foundation, 2018) and others (Norris, Stevens, Wyche & Pfefferbaum, 2008), communities in transition, such as Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, can have other triggers for enhanced resilience. These include the provision of visibility of the strengths of the community members and preservation of its history. In Cruzando Puentes this examination of what builds resilience was fostered through ethnographic exploration and visual ethnography. Through communitas, students and faculty had opportunities to engage with each other while visiting the partner organizations and gain an appreciation of the community context and systems within each of the organizations.
Further Notes on Methods: Visual Ethnography and the Community of Practice
Along with human development as a field of study, which included narrative, ethnography, and history, we employed visual ethnography, a unique methodology. Visual ethnography is a sub-field of cultural anthropology that aims to document visual representations of lived experience (Lenette & Boddy, 2013; Pink, 2013). It has roots in anthropology, where disciplinary boundary crossing brings together various theories, practices of art, and photography, with anthropological theory and practice (Pink et al., 2016). Among the reasons for the recent growth in popularity of visual ethnography is that visual ethnographers contend that some cultural elements are best represented visually and pairs with fieldwork very well because this method speaks to representation for both researcher(s) and participants (Pink, 2012, 2013).
We crossed many borders, both physically and metaphorically, during the LA Intensive, but especially in our time in Boyle Heights. We felt it was important to understand the lenses through which our ethnographic observations of the neighbourhood were situated. The lenses were different for each of us. For example, Eliza von Baeyer, stated: “I was a Canadian, studying at Fielding Graduate University in California by distance. I had never been to LA other than transferring flights at LAX, and my family and historical narratives were intertwined with Ellis Island, and not the West Coast immigration of Jews fleeing Nazi Europe.”
Students turned to visual ethnography to produce a visual narrative that they shared in a group presentation for their Fielding course once they returned home. Early ethnographers, especially Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, were pioneers in using photography to augment their fieldnotes (Holm, 2014; Shembri & Boyle, 2013; Varde, 2005). Bateson and Mead (1942) employed this “new method of stating the intangible relationships among different types of culturally standardized behaviours by placing side by side mutually relevant photographs” (p. xii). Since then, visual ethnography has been becoming increasingly popular for qualitative research, especially in cross-cultural studies, both as a step in the process of data generation and serving as core cultural data itself.
Eliza von Baeyer, David Blake Willis, Wayne Chang, and other members of the LA Intensive (described in Phase Two) took many photographs of Boyle Heights. Eliza then organized the photographs into triptychs as she analyzed the visual and cultural borders we crossed in Boyle Heights and Downtown LA through the lenses of visual ethnography. Eliza’s paper was presented at the Symposium in Society for Applied Anthropology Conference in April 2018 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with five others, several of whom are mentioned above. Emphasizing visual and social media, she traced Boyle Heights’ evolution from a significant immigration hub to its contentious present and a potentially sustainable future.
Boyle Heights: The Challenges of Crossroads Cultures and Stories of Resilience
In rapidly changing communities, diverse groups facing challenges reside together but are often disconnected. Boyle Heights, a well-known neighborhood in Los Angeles is historically significant as an intersection of many cultures and faiths. In more recent decades, the community became a notorious home for gangs (peaking in the 1980s), and presently it is challenged by gentrification. With approximately half of the population under eighteen and nearly all residents being Latino, there are also elders who are immigrants (often first-generation residents of the United States) who live largely disconnected from their neighbors, in several retirement communities. The current population of older adults in Los Angeles County (the second largest metropolitan area in the United States and the largest in California) is over 1.1 million and expected to double by the year 2030. In approximately two decades the three largest ethnic minority groups (Hispanics, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and African-Americans) will comprise two-thirds of Los Angeles’ older adult population (University of Southern California, USC Edward Roybal Institute, 2015).
Currently a resident of the greater LA area, Connie has been involved in lifelong learning programming in one of the retirement communities in Boyle Heights (Hollenbeck Palms) in conjunction with California State University Los Angeles (CSULA) for over 10 years. As a professor emerita from CSULA, Connie established a center for lifelong learning. She saw Hollenbeck Palms residents thrive when sharing their stories and engaging with students who represented different generations and cultures. In Hollenbeck Palms, residents have very little interaction with younger people in the nearby community, many of whom are challenged by gang violence, underemployment, and a landscape now changing due to gentrification. Gentrification, or the displacement of low-income residents (which has transformed several other communities near downtown Los Angeles), is expanding to Boyle Heights.
Like Connie, David is a professor at Fielding Graduate University, and as a cultural anthropologist he has long been interested in marginalized urban communities that are invisible or overlooked. His research began with work in Roxbury, Boston, in the 1960s and in the South Side of Chicago, where he lived in the 1970s. The vibrant creation of community in these two locations has been mirrored by what David has witnessed in his work with Dalits (once pejoratively referred to as ‘untouchables’) in urban South India, including Dalit drummers and other musicians as well as meat merchants and entrepreneurs. His research focus on migration, diaspora, and transnational communities and is also relevant to the historical shifts currently impacting Boyle Heights and downtown Los Angeles.
Graduate students have also contributed to this community of practice. A doctoral student at Fielding and community activist concerned with organizational systems, Diyana Dobberteen was introduced to Boyle Heights with a cohort of Fielding students during the Los Angeles Intensive Phase Two of Cruzando Puentes. Diyana’s inquiry revealed that gentrification in Boyle Heights stems from macro-system changes and she studied resilience in terms of how Boyle Heights’ community activists are responding to gentrification’s impacts. Student colleague and co-author, Eliza von Baeyer, a Canadian from Ottawa, was drawn to the politically infused art she saw represented in public murals in Boyle Heights as evidence of community resilience and a strong cultural identity, both past and present. A brief description of visual ethnography as a method, as well as insights that Eliza gained along with fellow students are presented in our discussion of Phase Two.
The Story of Cruzando Puentes: Project Phases and Community Partners
Designed as an exploratory case study (Yin, 2003b, in Berg, 2009) Cruzando Puentes started as a Social Transformation Project and continued as an ongoing collaborative research endeavor with the goal of creating a model for intergenerational and intercultural engagement that could be adapted for other communities of practice. The research question guiding the case study was “How can a community of practice integrate academic and service settings to promote intergenerational and intercultural mentoring?” The project data includes written and visual narratives, value narratives, and reports of a range of activities by partners in the project team.
As a participatory, multi-phased research project, we were also interested in exploring the possibility that the resilience capacity of this community of practice may be enhanced through the narrative element. More than just gathering data for analysis, this critical dimension of the project included storytelling among members of the community and visual narratives of the people and spaces in the community. In each of three separate project phases, stories of resilience were gathered. Several photos illustrate a visual ethnographic component of Cruzando Puentes.
Summarizing the Three Project Phases
Phase One of Cruzando Puentes involved defining the community of practice, establishing the networks, intersecting and interacting with the communities, and collecting narratives. Phase Two engaged students in a community of practice, an ethnographic/human development practicum that was a three-day intensive educational and social change experience. Phase Three was a research project examining mutual mentoring over meals at the Homegirl Café at Homeboy Industries, bringing together three teams of older adults/former gang members for three meals.
Partners in The Case Study
Fielding Graduate University. Essential to the mission and vision of its founders in 1974, our university’s approach to learning involves enhancing the capacities of the already accomplished adult learners to grow as scholars who put their knowledge into practice for the greater good. The learning model of Fielding Graduate University (Fielding) is designed to be supportive, self-directed, global, and rigorous. In 2015 Fielding was awarded the Carnegie Community Engagement classification due to its commitment as a publicly engaged university (Melville, 2016). The Institute for Social Innovation at Fielding Graduate University supports this Social Transformation Project and other initiatives to build human capital and sustainable change. Most students are working professionals, and in the Cruzando Puentes community of practice the participating students were enrolled in doctoral degree programs in Human Development as well as Organizational Development and Change.
California State University Los Angeles. California State University Los Angeles (CSULA) was founded in 1947 and enrolls over 20,000 students annually. It is one of the 23 campuses in the California State University system and a designated Hispanic-Serving Institution. In 2014 President William Covino launched The Center for Engagement, Service, and the Public Good in order to create a hub of civic engagement and public service for the city of Los Angeles and its communities and region. Service learning and neighborhood transformation are seen as a catalytic force for students, faculty and community residents. Our key CSULA partner throughout was Siouxsie Calderón, MSW, an alumna of the CSULA School of Social Work and adjunct faculty.
Hollenbeck Palms Retirement Community. Located in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles, Hollenbeck Palms was established in 1890 as Hollenbeck Home and was the first licensed retirement community in the state of California. It is independently owned and operated as a nonprofit organization (www.hollenbeckpalms.org). Living arrangements support those who live independently, as well as residents in need of assisted living and skilled nursing. Most residents are over 80 years of age and many are immigrants or are the first-generation born in the United States, including Japanese Americans who had lived in the area decades ago. Many of the Japanese Americans who had lived in this community were disenfranchised and displaced during the World War II due to their internment.
Homeboy Industries. Homeboy Industries (www.homeboyindustries.org) is the largest gang-intervention project in the United States, founded by Fr. Gregory Boyle in 1992. Fr. Boyle is well known for his book Tattoos on the Heart (Boyle, 2010) and more recently for the follow up book, Barking to the Choir (2017). Originating in Boyle Heights, Homeboy’s headquarters is now located in the Chinatown area of downtown Los Angeles. Thousands of formerly gang-involved men and women are offered supportive services (e.g., case management, mental health services, tattoo removal) and job-training through Homeboy. A thriving nonprofit organization, Homeboy operates social enterprises and provides on-site training for a variety of jobs in food service, recycling, electronic remanufacture, and teaches teamwork, and other skills. “Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job” is a motto on t-shirts made and sold by Homeboy.
Phase One: Original Project Plan and Case Study
The fall of 2015 marked the launch of Cruzando Puentes when project directors Connie Corley and David Blake Willis organized a team of faculty, students, and alumni from Fielding Graduate University to meet with older adults at Hollenbeck Palms Retirement Community. The team then explored prospects for engaging California State University Los Angeles through on-site programs like the Mobility Center at CSULA, which provides direct engagement of students with older adults on campus.
The Cruzando Puentes project team also spent time at Homeboy Industries and engaged in ethnographic observation in the Mariachi Plaza neighborhood in Boyle Heights, the East LA center of Latinx and Chicanx Culture, visiting colorful and unique stores nearby and outdoor vendors in the evening. Field visits gave the research team a sense of the richness of this vibrant community, which is rapidly changing. New businesses are entering the area and some of the character of the largely Latinx community is showing signs of displacement by gentrification and what some locals have called art-washing, or the increase in retail art galleries in this low-income community. Locals feel that business ventures and nonprofits cater mostly to rich, Caucasian non-residents.
View of Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles in the background.
In spring 2016 students in two social work courses taught by CSULA adjunct Siouxsie Calderón, “Social Policy and Aging” plus “Cross Cultural Practice with Older Adults,” had opportunities for direct interaction with older adults. Students in the policy class along with nutritional science students met with participants on campus who come to the Mobility Center, which provides students in kinesiology direct practice experiences with persons who have had strokes and other challenges impacting their mobility. Ms. Calderón also added a field trip component to the course, Cross Cultural Practice with Older Adults. One site was Hollenbeck Palms, where Connie provided a tour and invited a 90-year old resident who was a former activities director there and other residents to share about life at Hollenbeck. Members of the study team and a student from CSULA followed up with interviews of residents who had been met on the Hollenbeck Palms campus.
Phase One: A Story of Resilience
Erika C., student from CSULA, interviewed a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor living at Hollenback Palms (Erica L.), returning to meet with her after the class of students went for a site visit. Although Erika C. is from a different cultural background and generation than Erica L., who immigrated to the U.S. at age 70, their engagement with each other demonstrated immediate value for Erika C., plus potential value and applied value for her career aspirations. The experience of mutual mentoring enhanced each woman’s sense of resilience as each was affirmed in the context of the relationship. Here are quotes from Erika C.’s paper for the “Cross-Cultural Practice and Older Adults” class:
My feelings about aging began to stir up after witnessing my abuelita [Spanish for ‘grandmother’] endure a painful and life ending experience. Having had the opportunity to visit with Erica L. only puts life into perspective. Toward the end of our visit she requested I wheel her to the garden, and we sat listening to the chirping birds while admiring the roses after a day of rain. To document Erica L’s story and apply it to my life is a treat since I can understand life better today. I don’t understand why individuals go through horrific life changing situations, but I know that I have the power to be an advocate to individuals like my abuelita and Erica L. By expressing her experience, strength, and hope to others, we can learn from her tenacity so that others can be influenced. She continues to inspire others with her creative artistic creations and with her testimony.” (Erika C., personal communication, June 2016)
Phase Two: An Educational Intensive
As an extension of the model incorporating communitas we then planned Phase Two, “The Los Angeles Intensive”, which began with a multi-day educational program tied into the academic work of Fielding doctoral students in January 2017. Ethnographic observations of the Boyle Heights community including Hollenbeck Palms were part of the Intensive, as well as a tour and meal at the headquarters of Homeboy Industries. Opportunities to hear stories of older adults as well as former gang members were built into the experience. Participants included eleven Fielding doctoral students and faculty, Siouxsie Calderón and students from CSULA, along with residents of Hollenbeck Palms and Homeboy staff. Daily debriefings took place in order to process observations, field notes, and direct engagement with each other and community sites.
We often met over meals. These included a dinner with the older residents of Hollenbeck following the screening of Kalin’s documentary on Boyle Heights, East LA Interchange (See: http://www.eastlainterchangefilm.com), and lunch at the Homegirl Café after an extensive tour of Homeboy’s headquarters. These scheduled events and other spontaneous opportunities (including a poetry reading by Mike Sonksen, LA native, journalist, and advocate for LA communities) provided rich opportunities for teams of students to work together in communitas.
Several weeks following the LA Intensive, students presented the perspectives and lessons learned to a larger whole group that had engaged in an online platform for an academic term and course credit. Further, some students presented their insights and analyses from the LA Intensive at the Society for Applied Anthropology Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, in April 2018.
Phase Two LA Intensive: Making a Connection at Hollenbeck Palms
Phase Two: Stories of Resilience
During the Intensive, our team had an opportunity to dine with residents at Hollenbeck Palms and also take an extended tour of Homeboy Industries, which included lunch at the Homegirl Café. Students shared how experiencing deeply personal storytelling changed their perspectives and expanded their understanding of the role of resilience.
Cruzando Puentes took me to places I would not have gone to on my own. We ate dinner with internment camps survivors (WWII) who went into depth about the trials they faced with their families and overcame. It was profound, and I now appreciate how resilience impacts a lifecourse. (Diyana Dobberteen, personal communication, February 2018)
Another Fielding student, Wayne Chang, wrote a paper following the LA Intensive examining the relationship between forgiveness and resilience entitled, “Forgiveness, resilience and attributes of posttraumatic growth” (Chang, 2017) in which he noted:
An example of someone attributing forgiveness to bouncing back is “Danny,” a former gang member… at Homeboy Industries…. He described his forgiveness in accepting his wife back after a hiatus in his marriage: “However, when she returned to my side, I, uh, I had a choice to make. I could either harbor the resentment of her abandonment of our marriage, and the love that we had held, or I could forgive. And I had stumbled across this adage that says, ‘in order to live, you must forgive.’ And for me there is only one choice, because I missed everything about it. So, I welcomed her back in to my life and my heart.”
Danny also welcomed a son, at the time nearly three years old, that his wife had during their time apart. Because he forgave his wife and allowed both her and her new son back into his life, he noted that, “I am still the only guy that [his son] knows his dad to be. And I’m grateful that I made that choice because it gave me a greater sense of purpose in life.” He sees forgiveness as protecting him from hardships: “There’s a wonderful understanding that, you know, in life we often can injure those that are dearest to our heart. So, I think forgiveness is inherent in life because that puts a blanket of love over whatever it is that sometimes pops up.” (Danny, 2017 in Chang, 2017)
In these brief but impactful encounters our sense of communitas inspired a plan for research that included prolonged engagements and led to Phase Three of Cruzando Puentes.
Phase Three: Research at Homeboy Industries
Cruzando Puentes evolved into a pilot project in Phase Three, engaging students and alumni from Fielding Graduate University in observing and interviewing teams of older adults and Homeboys/Homegirls as they met multiple times over meals at the Homegirl Café in downtown LA in Summer, 2017. Preliminary analysis of the “meals and mentoring” research suggests that by talking over meals, sharing life experiences, and learning about one another, people can transcend differences and appreciate commonalities. Social isolation is reduced, intergenerational as well as intercultural interchange is fostered, and resilience is enhanced through mutual affirmation of experiences of thriving after adversity.
We met our goal of creating bridges across generations and cultures to foster mutual mentoring and contribute to the resilience of the participants in a series of structured engagements and through communitas. Interviews with the participants after the series of meals revealed the following themes: life course lessons, cultural connections, and comfort in sharing. Among comments from the Homeboy participants was their surprise at commonalities in some life experiences, appreciation for differences, and being able to talk about them openly. Deep connections formed for some dyads, and each valued having meaningful exchanges with people, whom they would not normally meet, in a safe environment out of the range of daily experiences.
Phase Three: Stories of Resilience
In one of the teams, two men who grew up in Boyle Heights in different eras (the 1950s–1960s compared to the 1980s–1990s) happened to have other unexpected commonalities – both having a paralyzed arm and both having served time in jail. Over three meals they learned why each had moved away from Boyle Heights and shared the experiences that led to their current lives. The younger man said of his elder companion, “His story was, I thought it was pretty crazy. Because of all the luck that he mentioned – I am sure that it wasn’t all luck.” His statement implies the elder member demonstrated resilience given all he had endured (such as challenges with addiction, loss of marriage, a health problem resulting in paralysis). Both men talked about the “luck” each of them had experienced surviving various life challenges, but their resilience in the face of violence, injuries (the gang member had been paralyzed by a gunshot), and jail time was not just a matter of chance. Their mutual trust and the instant connection they had was remarkable.
Homegirl Café – A Site for Meals and Mentoring in Los Angeles
Another of the Homeboy teams, in this case two women, bonded over their three meals together. The ‘Homegirl’ was in the early part of her 18-month engagement in the Homeboy program and was recruited for Cruzando Puentes to give her an opportunity to share her story one-to-one in preparation for a later commitment to share her story with groups of people on tours. She noted that it was hard to talk about the story of how she got to Homeboy following incarceration, but that more intimate sharing over meals allowed her to ‘open up” and recognize commonalities with an older woman she would not have known outside of Cruzando Puentes. The experience gave her new perspectives on how people can connect across age and cultural differences. She has since been hired by a local agency after completing the Homeboy program.
Cruzando Puentes and Resilience
Cruzando Puentes offered a new lens on generations and cultures through visual and oral narratives. It built the resilience of members within a community in transition due to gentrification, and it empowered vulnerable young adults (former gang members), students, and elders (including survivors of the Holocaust, the World War II Japanese internment camps, and other challenging experiences) through mutual mentoring and opportunities to share lessons from the lifecourse.
In each phase, stories of resilience were shared in planned engagements across members of the community of practice partner organizations. These experiences of communitas provided more in-depth engagement than the more typical visits to an organization; for example, going beyond a typical Homeboy Industries tour, by sharing meals together in Phase Three. The process allowed younger and older adults to go deeper in conversation. Also, through subsequent engagements with Homeboy that occurred throughout the phases, Connie found application for her experience/expression/engagement model in multiple interactions. What worked well with Holocaust survivors was transferable to other populations (in this case former gang members). Sharing meals and learning from elders who have survived life-threatening situations built the former gang members’ capacity to share stories of personal resilience more widely. Eventually, this Fielding study resulted in engaging with a larger public, through academic presentations and publications about Cruzando Puentes, our means of representing the essence of “radical kinship” which Homeboy founder Fr. Gregory Boyle describes in Barking to the Choir (2017).
Similar to lessons from her work with Holocaust survivors, Connie met her goal of providing a wider lens on the lifecourse experiences of people who embody resilience. Communities of LA and elsewhere are well-served when students/alumni/faculty from universities engage with members of communities and become connected to community settings through communitas. The resilience of the individuals as well as the communities they represent is enhanced, as noted by Siouxsie from CSULA (Corley & Willis, 2016). My participation in Cruzando Puentes has opened up a new way and style to my overall teaching philosophy. My confidence and connection to the campus, local life, and East Los Angeles has expanded more than expected. I am known as an expert in the field of aging and housing, and… feel competent in being able to take a group of students on field trips to where our elders live, play, and convalesce…I get to influence future social workers on why, where, and how to work with our elders. [In] student evaluations [some] state they have changed their major after taking the class with the field trips out to East LA senior sites. The School of Social Work has also recognized the field trips through sharing pictures and stories about our field trips out in the community. (Siouxsie Calderón, personal communication, June 2016)
Coming Full Circle: Boyle Heights as Resilient Community
As our principal partners in this collaborative and creative partnership between generations, the people of Boyle Heights prominently included elders with a long-term stake in the community from many different cultural perspectives. The award-winning historical documentary film previously noted, East LA Interchange, poignantly demonstrates this – how Boyle Heights has had many communities of practice. The Boyle Heights community breaks the conventional definition of community and is a powerful case study in many senses of the word. Like similar urban neighborhoods around the world, Boyle Heights provides a vibrant and lively tapestry which needs to be reported and made visible. The invisibility, indeed, has been a major disruptive force in the lives of many in the Los Angeles area, as the battles around Chavez Ravine and elsewhere show quite powerfully. Similarly, the yearnings and struggles of diasporic communities commemorate historical memory, power, and resistance that have cultural identity at the core of the changes that we witness over time – reflections of ethnicity, race, and gender in particular eras.
Boyle Heights locals’ impressions of the changing character of this modern hub of Chicanx culture were of interest to Fielding student, Diyana. Through reading about this issue in media, online, and via informal interviews she learned that rising rents, retail displacement, the introduction of art galleries, and real estate speculation threaten the community. Changes accelerated after 2009, when the LA Metro Gold Line linked Boyle Heights to downtown Los Angeles. The Gold Line, the name given to the Metro Line running through Boyle Heights, is symbolic of this. The rapid connection to the core it has initiated created a community-wide shift. As noted in a 2015 UCLA study of gentrification and transit in Los Angeles, construction of new transit often paves the way for gentrification (UCLA, 2015)
Residents of Boyle Heights who are threatened by recent socio-economic changes are resisting. Predominantly Chicanx/Latinx community members (immigrants, low-income residents and young adults) step into roles as activists opposing new threats to their livelihoods. They are organizing for cultural survival, rent control, greater community participation, and changes to community development policy (Almazan, 2017). As in other United States urban centers, growth and macro-political systems continue to challenge the resilience of Boyle Heights residents.
Conclusion
We have presented the components of a Social Transformation Project launched from seed funding and research support from one university, in collaboration with community partners and intersecting two universities that focused on the historic and richly diverse Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles and adjacent downtown Los Angeles. Situating the project as a community of practice, engaging members in communitas, and examining the use of ethnographic and narrative approaches has enabled us to locate points of tension and transformation as well as meeting places of harmony and social growth.
In the three phases of this project, both the open exchange of personal stories and the perspectives that participants gained in hearing about resilience over the lifecourse, were a result of communitas. As Los Angeles and Boyle Heights continue to grapple with complex realities of urban policy-making, an aging population, changing community demographics and modern cultural hybridity, advocates may consider this Fielding/CSULA/nonprofit organization community of practice as a model. Among areas for future research and visual ethnography are defining the avenues for community participation, expanding options for developing a space for cultural exchanges, and initiating projects that are intergenerational.
In conclusion, a surprising outcome of Cruzando Puentes is the resilience of our larger community of practice and the community itself. Four years plus after its inception, several individuals linked to our community, who took part in building this Social Transformation Project are still connected to the Boyle Heights community and other Los Angeles organizations that we engaged.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the support from the Fielding Graduate University Institute for Social Innovation and the faculty, students, and alumni who engaged in Cruzando Puentes. Hollenbeck Palms staff and residents, Homeboy staff and interns, and California State University Los Angeles students and faculty have been instrumental in the success of this community of practice. Parts of this manuscript are included in Corley and Willis (2016), reprinted with permission. Photos were taken by Connie Corley, David Blake Willis, and Eliza von Baeyer.
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About the Authors
Connie Corley, PhD has a long history of engagement in the fields of gerontology and geriatrics since her graduate studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor beginning in the late 1970s. As a doctoral faculty member in the School of Leadership Studies at Fielding Graduate University, Dr. Corley leads the doctoral concentration in Creative Longevity and Wisdom. She is Professor Emeritus at California State University, Los Angeles. A Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and the Academy of Gerontology in Higher Education, Dr. Corley has earned numerous awards of distinction. She has been engaged in multiple programs as a mentor and leader in curriculum development. Her work has involved creativity in later life (emerging out of a national study of Holocaust survivors, led by Roberta Greene, PI). She created the “Experience, Engagement, Expression” model, demonstrating successive levels of engagement and wider ranging expression of creativity based on life experiences. The model inspired the multi-year Cruzando Puentes (“Crossing Bridges”,) an intergenerational and intercultural community of practice in diverse communities of Los Angeles. Dr. Corley co-hosts and produces a radio show on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles (Experience Talks), interviewing guests who are seasoned in life. Dr. Corley may be contacted at ccorley@fielding.edu.
David Blake Willis, PhD is Professor of Anthropology and Education at Fielding Graduate University and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Soai Buddhist University in Osaka, Japan. He taught and did research at the University of Oxford and has been Visiting Professor at Grinnell College and the University of Washington. His interests in anthropology, community, social justice, sustainability, and immigration come from nearly 40 years living in traditional cultural systems in Japan and India. He researches and writes on transformational community, leadership and education, human development in transnational contexts, the Creolization of cultures, transcultural communities, and Dalit/Gandhian liberation movements in South India. His publications include World Cultures – The Language Villages with Walter Enloe; Sustainability Leadership: Integrating Values, Meaning, and Action with Fred Steier and Paul Stillman (2015); Reimagining Japanese Education: Borders, Transfers, Circulations, and the Comparative with Jeremy Rappleye (2011); Transcultural Japan: At the Borders of Race, Gender, and Identity with Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu (2007); and Japanese Education in Transition 2001: Radical Perspectives on Cultural and Political Transformation with Satoshi Yamamura (2002). Dr. Willis may be contacted at dwillis@fielding.edu.
Diyana Dobberteen, MA is pursuing a doctoral degree at Fielding Graduate University. Previously she earned a Master’s Degree in ethnography from University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSD) and a Bachelor’s Degree in anthropology from University of California, San Diego (UCSB). Her dissertation research addresses organizational learning within the global climate justice movement. She will apply social movement theory and organizational learning theory to better understand how issue frames diffuse across interorganizational coalitions as they engage in climate action online. Diyana has a depth of capacity building, community outreach, and program development experience having implemented numerous programs: teenage pregnancy prevention strategies, college access for underrepresented students, and public health education. In a nonprofit consulting role, she worked with Fielding’s President, Katrina Rogers, Ph.D., and faculty to bring affordable consulting to nonprofit organizations in the Santa Barbara community (2006-2007). A child welfare agency and alcohol rehabilitation nonprofit were among the clients. She recalls how data-driven solutions from Fielding’s strategic planning with participating organizations significantly improved services and in turn increased community resilience. In addition, Diyana helped Fielding’s Worldwide Network for Gender Empowerment to partner with the local Planned Parenthood affiliate and conduct a regional LGB&T sexual health community needs assessment (2016-2017). Diyana may be contacted at ddobberteen@email.fielding.edu.
Eliza von Baeyer, MA is currently a PhD student in the Organizational Development and Change program at Fielding Graduate University and a graduate of its year-long certificate in evidence-based coaching. Over her time at Fielding, arts-based research and ethnography have become central to her coursework and the development of her dissertation. They are natural extensions of her life-long artistic endeavours, such as photography, jewelry making and collage work; activities that have previously taken a back seat to her academic and employment activities. During the same time period as her coursework, she helped resettle Tibetan refugees in Ottawa, Canada, which along with arts-based methods, informs her dissertation. She is combining visual ethnographic and photovoice methods to study the resettlement of Tibetan women, skills she also applied to the intensive in Boyle Heights, discussed in this monograph. When not working on a Fielding-related academic activity, she can be found in Ottawa working as an organizational psychologist specializing in change management, coaching, and program evaluation, using the scholar-practitioner model as the foundation to her work, and including the arts wherever she can. Eliza may be contacted at evonbaeyer@email.fielding.edu.