Data  Sources

In order to investigate locative media within the context of spatial segregation in the hybrid space among and about Latinos/as, the first empirical step to undertake this research project was an attempt to partner with different organizations and institutions that serve underserved communities, mainly African-Americans and Latinos/as, in Austin. My advisor and I reached out to a museum, two libraries, a newspaper, and two non-profit organizations. The partners of this research were chosen based on previous knowledge and previous contact with individuals related to the organizations. It is also important to stress that the goal was to engage institutions that deal with minorities or underserved communities, as this study was concerned with the segregation of the hybrid space caused by racial segregation. Hence, I will start by describing the process with the two organizations that partnered with this study, and then I will proceed to explain the other attempts of partnering.

On April 10, 2013, my supervisor and I met with Laura Donnelly Gonzalez, the founder of the non-profit organization Latinitas, and former program coordinator

Samantha Lopez. Over an hour-long conversation, we presented our ideas and research goals, and discussed the possibility of a partnership. We also talked about general goals of the organization. For example, Latinitas aims to guide Latinas girls to go to college. They mentioned the increasing number of girls dropping out of schools as compared to boys, issues of rape, and pregnancy. They also mentioned how the girls are shy and are in the process of discovering themselves, and how they express themselves through the Latinitas blog. During our meeting, one of the Latinitas' staff said: “They do not know what they are good at.” I understood that one of the goals of the institution was to help the students to develop a sense of identity. Furthermore, Laura Donnelly Gonzalez expressed concern with Latinas’ writing skills, since many of these girls struggle with bilingual activities and need to trust their language skills, as usually they speak Spanish at home and are educated in English at school.

The meeting with Latinitas's director and program coordinator resulted in two outcomes for involvement: after-school programs and a weeklong summer camp during a session called “Media is Power” to take place in June 2013. The camp was planned for teenage girls, and the training about locative media to the purpose of this research would be integrated in the after-school program and summer camp, as I will explain in detail later on in this chapter.

A second partner to come onboard was the non-profit organization River City Youth Foundation (RCYF). Having previously volunteered at RCYF in 2012, we reconnected with the Director Mona Gonzalez and Program Coordinator Oné Musel-Gilley. Afterwards, I met with Oné on May 23 2013 to talk about the details about the partnership. The fieldwork, however, at the organization only started in the beginning of October 2013, when the organization allowed me to be one of their instructors for the TechComunidad program and teach adults about mobile and locative media aiming to have as final outcome a locative story produced by the participants. I will explain further details of this partnership later in this chapter.

We also tried to partner with Huston Tillutson University, a historically Black university. For this purpose, we met with Professor Carol L. Adams Means. We hoped to diversify the demographics and work with African-Americans through an institution. Our proposal intended to work alongside students in an English course to run the same workshop about locative media and the production of locative storytelling about memory and history. This professor was the only contact we had at

that university. Unfortunately, the professor, who is retired and still working at the university, did not have the resources or time to partner with this research project.

A separate attempt at a partnership was with a public library. The idea was to undertake a pilot study in the teen lab, where children spend the afternoon undertaking tasks in computers. We wanted to encourage them to produce locative stories and upload them to the map of Austin. For example, in one trial session, I showed them on a paper world map of Brazil where I was from. I explained that there are ways to digitally attach information to places. Most of the attendants were boys around 9, 10 year-old. They paid attention to what I was saying but they got distracted very quickly.

Only two kids seemed to have knowledge about smartphones and tablets.

When they were exploring the map on Historypin, it was clear that they tended to look for the country or city they are originally from. One of them searched for Cuba and another for a small town in Texas. Interestingly enough, a 10 years-old boy searched for Russia. When I asked him why he was curious for Russia, he said that the game he plays is set in Russia. He was astonished to having found Russia and even more astonished with the size of Russia as he said: “Russia is much bigger than United States”.

These observations are here just to illustrate the potential of the partnership with the library, however, while working with them, I encountered several problems.

First, the Internet at this institution was very slow and we had trouble to have the Historypin website loaded. As a result, several kids got distracted and some of them were not even able to navigate on the site. In fact, some kids complaint and said out loud that they liked the games better than Historypin.

I got back to this teen lab for a second time, and the boy who searched for Russia said that he “watched” Historypin at home, which reinforce the potential of the group to eventually to produce locative stories and geotag them on the map of Austin.

Although those preliminary observations indicated the teen lab a fertile place to do research, there were several institutional barriers that would make difficult to publish the results of the research. The person who was the mediator with the institution said that was not possible to have a permission to conduct research from the institution.

For this reason, it was not possible to continue the project at this public library.

We also attempted to partner with a separate public library located in East Austin. After meeting with the Managing librarian, he introduced two projects with which we could eventually partner. One of the projects involved a middle school teacher who was working on an oral history project and the other one was the "The Tejano Walking Trail", which ended up being included as a location source in one of the case studies. This trail is 4.95 miles long and includes schools, libraries, churches, residences and historic homes related to the Latino culture in Austin. The East Cesar Chavez Neighborhood Planning Team created the trail. Although the conversation with the Managing library was fruitful and generated other meetings (e.g.: with Tejano Walking Trail), the partnership with this institution was not accomplished, because it required resources, such as time, that I was not able to have at that time.

The author and her advisor in Austin also met with Social Media Editor of the local newspaper in Austin, the Austin Statesman. We presented the project to the social media editor as a possibility of involving the community to use their archives to produce locative stories and attach them to the map of Austin. The idea was to help to publicize the interface of the project, get participants who had stories with local knowledge to share. The newspaper would benefit by drawing in young new readers.

Issues such as copywriting and integrity of information were raised by the editor, which prevented us from partnering with them. Questions such as: How much are we giving away for free?

The social media editor also asked to see a prototype, but at that time we did not have one. She also said that she was not the right person to make a decision about that partnership. We stated our goals were to create an archive of news stories, digitize them and attach them to places (photos, historical reports, articles), reinforce collective memory. This partnership would be an attempt to tie concepts of locative media to local and community journalism. However, we did not see a means, at least at that point, to set the partnership with them.

One of my last meetings was with Gloria Espitia, who serves as the Mexican-American Community Archivist at the Austin History Center. She was very resistant to the research project about locative media, since she considers smartphones a threat to social interaction. In fact, she said she did not have a smartphone herself and rather than using phone she preferred talking to people in person. This statement reflects how she reacted to this study, which was presented to her as a possibility of creating

history from scratch to be visualized on digital mobile devices and maps by underserved communities. To argument in favor of this research study, I mentioned to her local ongoing projects such as Tejano Walking Trail and she raised questions such as: Who is going to these places? Who is going to benefit? The archivist did not show much interest in partnering with this research project because she was very skeptical about the technology and also about the validation of local history produced by ordinary people. As a result, this study did not have Austin History Center as a partner.

From these attempts, two organizations accepted to collaborate with this project: Latinitas and River City Youth Foundation (RCYF), which both work with Latinos/as demographics in Austin, Texas. Although we learn several lessons on the work with Latinitas, the work with them functioned as a pilot study that guided us and helped us to reframe the entire research. After working with Latinitas, which spaced out having activities in Austin and also in Round Rock, we decided to focus on the geographical area of Austin and also to areas that face the legacy of historical segregation. This change was made, because we found it more appropriate to our research objectives to study locative media in just one locality. That is why a third setting was added to this study. As I considered the population who lived in areas that faced formal or informal segregation the "among", as it was explained in the Introduction, I added the "about" which consists of undergraduate students of the course called 'Mapping Latino Culture in East Austin", at The University of Texas at Austin. This choice was taken in order to create a theoretical bifurcation that allows us to analyse the impact of locative storytelling among and about Latinos/as.

Again, just for clarification, it is important to say that among refers to Latino/a residents in a neighborhood located in an informally segregated area and about refers to the college students, who were mostly Latinos/as but not resident in the traditionally segregated area. Both groups, as participants of this study, were encouraged to produce locative storytelling, but while the among group were encouraged to write/think about the neighborhood where they live, the about group were assigned to leave their areas of residence to visit certain locations in the historical segregated area.