Episode Four: "How Can I Make This Loss of Knowledge Actionable?"
Victoria Ferrell Ortiz
Barrio Historian & Executive Director of RAYO Planning
"How Can I Make This Loss of Knowledge Actionable?"
Sophie: Hi friends. This is Sophie Ziegler, and you're listening to "what is solidarity history?"
If you're joining us for the first time, I think it might be a good idea to start at the beginning with episode one. I feel that I've learned a lot with every guest we've had. And I feel like certain themes emerge, and that they're woven through the conversation in different ways.
For example, we've heard a lot about ensuring that histories are actionable, about performance art as a way of embodying oral histories, about contemporary storytelling to ensure a richer history for all of us in the future.
This week we're hearing from Victoria Ferrell Ortiz.
Victoria uses she her pronouns and is a neighborhood historian and urban planner in Dallas, Texas.
We started our conversation with Victoria telling us about how she got started with memory work.
Victoria: So my name is Victoria Ferrell Ortiz. I am a barrio historian, barrio means neighborhood in Spanish, of Cemento Grande, the Trinity Portland Cement Company town, which is located in West Dallas. and then also Oak Cliff where I live now. I grew up in West Dallas until the age of five and then moved to Oakcliff with my mom.
I went to the University of North Texas in Denton, but then after graduating came back to Oakcliff. Oakcliff is really my home and Dallas is my home. I love learning about BIPOC history in Dallas because I feel like as a product of our public school system, I didn't learn about a local history until after I graduated college even.
I'm a person who is multiethnic my mom, my maternal family is Mexican, Mexican-American immigrated f rom Mexico. And then my dad is a person of color, but was adopted by my family who are white and of Irish and German descent. And that's why I have the last name Farrell. And then my married name is Ortiz.
From a young age, I saw a great disparity in the lived experience of my two families, my white family and my Mexican family. My Mexican family were from like the southern part of Dallas, west Dallas specifically. And being with them, it felt very like homey and it felt very like, loved and embraced.
But there are certain things about being with them, food access going to libraries in West Dallas, that weren't as well resourced as the libraries that my dad took me to in some of the suburbs that my, my white family lived in. My West Dallas family also lived in neighborhoods that were adjacent to industrial land uses.
So factories that were throwing out pollutants, right? And in my dad's family's neighborhoods that would never happen. That's like something that would be unheard of unprecedented in their community. They also had like basic amenities that were not considered basic in West Dallas sometimes like having stronger sidewalk infrastructure, having better runoff systems for drainage and sewage.
All of those things really pointed out the different systemic barriers that occurred because of racism. Because of white supremacy culture, and that's something that I really wish I had've learned about at a younger age because it took me years to fill in the gaps. It wasn't something that my parents really had the knowledge to describe to me.
And so it has so much to do with the work that I do now as a historian, but then also I just came on as the executive director of RAYO Planning a 5 0 1 c3 Urban Planning nonprofit that advocates for fair and affordable housing free of Environmental Hazards, which I'm sure you can guess, Sophie and listeners, is so important to me considering where I grew up in West Dallas. I have asthma and I attribute that to the fact that I grew up in a place that had industrial polluters throwing out things into the air that were harmful to me as a child and considering the fact that my mom also like during her pregnancy she lived in West Dallas too.
Sophie: It's hard to see systematic oppression, but there are ways to do so. One is to live away that overlaps the divide between communities. And the divide between communities can be stark. Take for example, Victoria's grandmother's community who worked for what was at the time, a large cement production plant in what is now a part of Dallas.
And she lived in the attached community town.
Victoria: So Cemento Grande is the Spanish name for the Trinity Portland Cement company town. This company town was started because of the realization a, lime deposit that could be resourced and turned into cement.
The Coen brothers who founded this company realized that they didn't have like the workforce that was interested in this kind of work, so they send out advertisements to South Texas to recruit workers from Mexico. And then they built towns around the company to house their workers.
Part of that is like the Mexican town. There is a town for white foremans and then a town for black people as well. And so this is a history that I didn't really know about until my paternal grandmother, my Grammy, she was put into a memory care facility and at which point I evaluated what I knew about her as a person, not just my Grammy, but Betsy, the individual.
And I realized that I didn't know enough about her, and so I was like, how can I make this loss of knowledge actionable? What can I do? And so I felt an onus to sit down with my maternal grandmother, my wella. So in, in Spanish you can say like Abela, but then an even abbreviated version of that is Wella and like a Spanglish thing.
But I sat down with her and I was like, "whatever you'd like to share. I'm happy to listen to you. Really you can start wherever you." At this point I had no kind of oral history training And so I just really propped a camera in front of her and pressed record and one of the first things that she told me, Sophie, was that, "Hey, where's cementellas."
And my Spanish isn't great. So I had to ask her what does that mean to you? And she said our people are the people of the Trinity Portland Cement Company town known as Cemento Grande. And we helped source the cement that built up the city of Dallas. And that was something that, like I said, I had no idea.
And I asked her like, why didn't you tell me this sooner? And she's I didn't think you'd be interested. I had a group of cousins who were maybe 10, 15 years older and I think, like they weren't thinking about those things yet.
I'm sure they are now. But I think because of that precedent, she didn't think that I would be interested, but I was. And so it was a wonderful moment for us to connect and for me to get that generational knowledge and historical wealth from my living ancestor, my grandmother.
But I began doing research about Cemento Grande and our contributions. Cement that was sourced from the Trinity Portland Cement company town. Helped to build up the longest standing concrete structure at that time, which is the Houston Street Viaduct.
But even now, if you were to go to Cemento Grande, now there's only two remnants of this town.
So there's Campo Santo de Cemento Grande, which is the cemetery for Mexican workers that passed during our last pandemic, which is the Spanish influenza a lot of women and children passed away during that time. And my grandmother, my wella, has a little brother who's buried there. And it's a building that again, has experienced a negative impact due to bad development.
And that's tying it into my urban planning work.
AT&T built a building an office space right in front of the cemetery and it closed off the pathway that people used to use to access it. And so there is years where you would have to sneak in behind another car because it was gated.
So you'd have to wait for a AT&T employee to come in or leave to get through the gate. Now because people have complained so much they have a button that you can press for security if you're wanting to visit just visit like your loved ones who are interned there, you can, so you press the security button and it'll beep and you can make it through the gate now, but that's not the way that it always was.
Another remnant of the town is the Eagle Ford School. It's a school that was built up using the cement from the factory and was, it's the purpose of the school was to teach children whose parents were workers at the factory.
And it was also a school that was integrated at a time that integration wasn't really happening. The building has been landmarked has been reactivated in a pretty cool way.
I'm happy, by the way that it has been preserved it's now a event space that people use for their weddings or quinceaneras or other different events like that. But those are the last two remnants of Cemento Grande. So if you were to go there now, you wouldn't really understand the layout of things because now there's a Lowe's, a Walmart.
But we have the cemetery and the school to use as references. To where everything else used to be.
Sophie: I've never seen the cemetery or the school. In fact, I've only been to Dallas once or twice, and those were short trips. Just in town for a conference. But looking at a Google maps, representation of the area, it's clear to see what Victoria means. There's an AT&T corporate office campus just off interstate 30.
The intertate exit looks like you'd expect. There's the Lowe's and the Walmart. There's also a Starbucks, a Chili's and a Golden Corral. All the types of food and shopping chain stores that you'd find on almost any interstate exit when traveling through cities of any size. Maybe I've even taken this exit before. I honestly have no idea.
But I do know that I'd never heard of Cemento Grande or the Eagle Ford school before talking to Victoria.
The bland sameness of the current landscape works in sharp contrast to the historical specifics that Victoria works to save. This work requires a sense of connection, a sense of solidarity.
At least that's how I would put it. I asked Victoria if and how she sees solidarity at play in her work.
Victoria: I think solidarity has a huge role to play because as someone who is multiethnic, I have degrees of privilege that I can leverage on others' behaves.
My ancestors might not have been able to advocate because they were trying to just baseline survive to find like moments of joy where they could and so again I think about solidarity a lot in that I want to help to bring us to a place where our history can inform the future that we create collectively.
I think that there's opportunities to show solidarity, not just amongst like a a spectrum of race and ethnicity, but also through other communities, whether that be people who are disabled or have physical differences.
I have syndactylism and one of my hands is smaller than the other. I had surgery whenever I was about two to separate my fingers, so that way I could have like more dexterity and typing and I took piano classes to help me with that.
There's opportunities there for us to advocate for just amenities that are representative of everyone. Like I have a daughter who's five now, and so we take her to the playground and I look at playgrounds and I consider is this playground accessible to someone to a, child who has disabilities or has some kind of attribute that isn't in dominant culture.
And those are just avenues for us to really innovate and to do better. Also thinking of the lgbtq plus community and how, there's been so much hurt in the past, but we can use that, hurt to again, galvanize ourselves for actionable differences that can help make our future better.
Sophie: I love the idea of actionable differences that Victoria mentioned here. This is exactly what I was talking about at the top of this episode. How this theme is woven through all the people we've talked to.
The way Natalie Nia talks about performance art and Ray Garringer uses narratives to open possibilities for rural queer life. And how Jasmine and the Curve Foundation promote journalists and other storytellers through funding and resource allocation.
In the same way, Victoria renders historically oriented solidarity actionable through her work with urban planning.
Victoria: The historical context is key.
Can't just step into any neighborhood space without considering the historical context and to do that would be a great disservice to the community. And I personally have seen planning efforts come out of the City of Dallas sometimes where it's not put into the historical context of, Hey, this is first land that has been stolen from indigenous and American Indian people. And there are realms of colonization being reactivated over and over again through different systems.
It's really important to consider the history of a neighborhood, otherwise you're stepping into a space could be making people feel like they're not the experts about their neighborhood when they completely are.
Sometimes urban planning can be overly technical and make people feel like they don't know what they're saying in regards to their neighborhood, and that's not what RAYO wants people to feel in regards to our work and just in general, urban planning is for everyone.
I think that being in Dallas and, seeing how things have gone down here you want better, you want more intentionality. You wanna see people of color or people who have similar lived experiences leading these planning efforts.
An understanding and appreciation of the past that informs the present also opens new futures. I asked Victoria what she'd like to see in that future.
Yeah. Thinking about being a kid and going to the different libraries that my family members had access to, I would hope that people were able to say that RAYO as a as an organization, right, but then also my work as an individual, really pushed us forward to seeing neighborhoods where your zip code was not the predictor to everything about you. Where it didn't determine your access to amenities, it didn't determine the quality of your education, your exposure to pollution, your access to job opportunity, or other opportunities in general.
Giving people the opportunity to say "Hey, this is what success looks like to me." And then them having the resources to achieve that self-determined success.
Sophie: A future in which access is individualized. That reminds me again of the interstate exit that now exists near the former site of Cemento Grande, how that exit can seem so unremarkable unless you know what marks that land a special. Understanding and celebrating difference, recognizing and protecting distinctions is a theme in Victoria's work, as is evident in her final remarks in our conversation.
Victoria: My work has always operated in different systems and buckets, but they're all connected. And so I'd just love to invite listeners to think about what positionality they have to leverage in different systems. Cuz you might think "oh, the urban planning space isn't for me." Or, "Oh, archiving and history isn't for me."
It's just about finding those those connectors those bridges to create collaboration. They're there. And honestly, you might be a missing piece of the puzzle.
In your special uniqueness and oneness, I hope that you consider everything that you have to offer and you bring that to the table with you.
Sophie: One of the most common questions I've been asked during this project is how to generalize the idea of solidarity history work to folks who don't identify with a particular community that we've talked about on here. Our first few examples, for instance, featured queer specific work. So we have questions about whether or not there's space for non-queer history workers.
My answers to this take on a number of different forms. But I think what Victoria just said, said much better than I ever do: think about your positionality. Think about your uniqueness.
Consider everything you have to offer. And that can lead you to find where you fit. We need you in this struggle. We need you to fill the gaps that only you can fill. We need you to help us see the special parts of the world that can all too often seem completely unremarkable.
Thank you for listening everyone. Please take care and let the ones you love know that you loved them.
Our show's original music is by Andrew Kuo. Today's show was arranged and hosted by me, Sophie Ziegler, so there's really no one else to blame. If you want to help out, you can support the Solidarity History Initiative on Patreon .
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We'll be back next time to talk about more solidarity history bye y'all.