Speaker 1: Improvisations really important in writing, because you discover things as
Speaker 1: you write if you already know everything. This is what
Speaker 1: I always say to students. If you know everything you're
Speaker 1: going to write, then it's not worth writing.
Speaker 2: From Futuro Media and PRX, It's Latino Usa. I'm marieo
Speaker 2: Josa Today, one of the most influential anthropologists of our time,
Speaker 2: tells us about her creative process on the page and
Speaker 2: on the dance floor. Ruth Behar had to learn the
Speaker 2: rules of anthropology to know she wanted to break them. Today,
Speaker 2: Ruth is a well known name in academic and literary circles,
Speaker 2: but before all that, Ruth was a PhD student at Princeton.
Speaker 2: There she was taught that anthropologists had to be impersonal,
Speaker 2: objective observers of the people and cultures that they study,
Speaker 2: And for years Ruth was a good student, exceptional student.
Speaker 2: In fact, Ruth was the first Latina to be awarded
Speaker 2: a MacArthur Genius Fellowship in nineteen eighty eight, when she
Speaker 2: was just thirty two years old. But in nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 2: Ruth published a book she thought might end her career.
Speaker 2: She titled it The Vulnerable Observer Anthropology that Breaks your Heart.
Speaker 2: It's a collection of personal and ethnographic essays where she
Speaker 2: argues that objectivity in cultural anthropology is a myth. This
Speaker 2: approach changed the field as we know it.
Speaker 1: I still get emails and letters from people who have
Speaker 1: read the book and they said, thanks to you, I
Speaker 1: did this, so I wrote this, or I would never
Speaker 1: have done this, or would never have talked about myself
Speaker 1: in my scholarship. So it did open a door for
Speaker 1: others who wanted to write in a different way than
Speaker 1: they had been taught to write.
Speaker 2: Ruth was born in Cuba to a Jewish family.
Speaker 3: Later she was raised in Queens, New York.
Speaker 2: Her heritage as informed not only her anthropological career, but
Speaker 2: her career as a writer as well. In recent years,
Speaker 2: Ruth has written numerous books for children and young adults
Speaker 2: like her granddaughters. Her latest young adult novel, Across So
Speaker 2: Many Seas, was released in early twenty twenty four. Producer
Speaker 2: Elisaveena has been fascinated with the work of Ruth Behar
Speaker 2: for years, and while getting to know her, Elisa discovered
Speaker 2: they have a unique connection. Not only are they both
Speaker 2: Cuban American writers, they're both also salsa dancers.
Speaker 4: Who are an anthropologist, but you are a dancing.
Speaker 2: I'm a dancing anthropologist, and as Ruth will tell you,
Speaker 2: her experiences on the dance floor translate rather poetically to
Speaker 2: the page. Today, we're bringing you a story about a multifaceted,
Speaker 2: multi talented scholar, told by a person touched by her work.
Speaker 3: And I'm going to let Elisa Veena take it from here.
Speaker 5: A few months ago, Ruth Baihar and I made plans
Speaker 5: to go to salsa class together, but before we made
Speaker 5: it to class, she came over to my apartment to
Speaker 5: chat for a while. The first thing on our agenda
Speaker 5: was her latest book, Across so Many Seas. I spent
Speaker 5: the day on the beach reading the book.
Speaker 3: You're getting paid to do this? Wait, what's going on here?
Speaker 5: The book centers on four twelve year old girls from
Speaker 5: the same Sephardic family, spread across space and time.
Speaker 1: We're going to see how they're thinking, how they're living,
Speaker 1: how they're feeling, what they're doing, what dreams they have.
Speaker 1: We don't stop being twelve year old girls when we're
Speaker 1: twenty five or when we're sixty something, right, I mean
Speaker 1: that that girl is still inside of us. And I
Speaker 1: tried to make it a very poetic book as well,
Speaker 1: so that it would interest a young reader, because I
Speaker 1: think young readers like poetic writing, but I think older
Speaker 1: readers do too, so I was hoping it would be
Speaker 1: kind of an old ages book.
Speaker 5: I was excited to learn about this book because I
Speaker 5: always learned something from Ruth. I first discovered her work
Speaker 5: in twenty twenty two when I was a fellow at
Speaker 5: Latino USA. During my fellowship, I worked on a radio
Speaker 5: essay about the condo collapse that killed ninety eight people
Speaker 5: in Miami Beach a year earlier.
Speaker 3: Right to that breaking news tonight where we continue to
Speaker 3: follow the latest on this condo building collapse.
Speaker 2: These videos and images out of Surfside, Florida show unbelievable destruction.
Speaker 5: It was a tragedy that happened blocks away from the
Speaker 5: apartment I lived in with my grandmother, where I spent
Speaker 5: a lot of my childhood, And every day that I
Speaker 5: sat down to write felt like I was breaking my
Speaker 5: heart open again and again. One of my friends and
Speaker 5: colleagues knew I was struggling, so she emailed me the
Speaker 5: first chapter of The Vulnerable Observer.
Speaker 1: As a storyteller opens her heart to a story listener
Speaker 1: recounting hers that cut deep and raw into the gullies
Speaker 1: of the self.
Speaker 3: Do you the observers.
Speaker 1: Stay behind the lens of the camera, switch on the
Speaker 1: tape recorder, keep the pen in hand.
Speaker 5: At the time, I didn't know who Ruth was, or
Speaker 5: that this book caused a sea change in anthropology. I
Speaker 5: just knew that reading her words, her prose mixed with poetry,
Speaker 5: mixed with ethnography, it gave me the momentum I needed
Speaker 5: to keep going.
Speaker 1: Vulnerability doesn't mean that anything personal goes. The exposure of
Speaker 1: the self, who is also a spectator, has to take
Speaker 1: us somewhere we couldn't otherwise get to.
Speaker 5: I soon learned that Ruth and I had friends in common,
Speaker 5: because that's just how Miami and the Cuban diaspora were.
Speaker 5: We were eventually connected when she was visiting family in
Speaker 5: Miami Beach, and while we were talking about writing, we
Speaker 5: somehow started talking about dance, and we realized that we're
Speaker 5: both salsa dancers.
Speaker 1: Dance is this wonderful nonverbal communication, and in fact, you
Speaker 1: don't have to talk right It's this wonderful universal language
Speaker 1: where you lead the steps and you can dance with
Speaker 1: each other and you don't have to speak the same
Speaker 1: spoken language at all.
Speaker 5: So now whenever Ruth is in Miami, we go to
Speaker 5: salsa class together. Dance has allowed us to cultivate a
Speaker 5: friendship that's been so nourishing for me as a young writer.
Speaker 5: Ruth has shown me that writing is about trusting your instincts.
Speaker 5: It's just like trying and use salsa step. Your ego
Speaker 5: has to get out of the way to let the
Speaker 5: real magic happen.
Speaker 1: You have to be humble when you're writing and you
Speaker 1: don't know how the writing is going to happen. Sometimes,
Speaker 1: like I'll sit there and go, I don't really know
Speaker 1: what's going to happen next. You know this story, I
Speaker 1: hope I can figure it out. You've got to take
Speaker 1: each step as it goes.
Speaker 5: Roots insights shape my own approach to writing. In the
Speaker 5: case of Across so many seas, Roots process was all
Speaker 5: about building a strong structure and following the beats laid
Speaker 5: out before her.
Speaker 1: For me, having a structure of format is really helpful.
Speaker 1: In my previous book, Letters from Cuba, it was all letters,
Speaker 1: and it didn't seem so daunting somehow that I was
Speaker 1: writing a letter instead of a chapter.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And with this book, it was knowing that it was
Speaker 1: going to be each girl, that each section would be
Speaker 1: about forty or fifty pages, because it couldn't be that
Speaker 1: long if I was going to have the fourth story.
Speaker 1: So here are four girls, four places, four time periods.
Speaker 1: How is this going to work? How am I going
Speaker 1: to put this together so it's readable? And somebody isn't thinking, well,
Speaker 1: these are four different stories or four different short stories,
Speaker 1: but they're not. They're all part of the same big story.
Speaker 1: I just decided it would start in fourteen ninety two
Speaker 1: and then it would end in the present day, and
Speaker 1: these different time periods were something cataclysmic is happening in
Speaker 1: their societies.
Speaker 5: There's a big gap in time between the first two
Speaker 5: protagonists in across so many seas. The first girl, Miminida,
Speaker 5: lives in fourteen ninety two when her family is expelled
Speaker 5: from Torlelo during the Spanish Inquisition. The next character is
Speaker 5: Miminida's descendant, who lives in Turkey in nineteen twenty three.
Speaker 5: Ruth connected both these characters through an instrument called an ood.
Speaker 1: Such a beautiful instrument, and the ood plays a very
Speaker 1: important role in the story because well, for a few reasons.
Speaker 1: For her personal reason, because my paternal grandmother, who was
Speaker 1: named Rebecca, she traveled to Cuba with an ood. She
Speaker 1: literally brought an ood with her from Turkey to Cuba.
Speaker 1: And then we knew that she sang these old songs,
Speaker 1: the old Sephardic or Spanish songs. So we knew that,
Speaker 1: and that's basically all we knew about her, and that
Speaker 1: she had been sent to Cuba, that she had been
Speaker 1: sent to Cuba by her parents, and then she never
Speaker 1: saw her parents. And again, so these were the things
Speaker 1: I knew about that grandmother, and they seemed very mysterious.
Speaker 1: So she really inspired the story kind of the mystery
Speaker 1: of what was going.
Speaker 3: On in her life.
Speaker 1: She also didn't like to talk, I think, as much
Speaker 1: about her story. She didn't share as much. And when
Speaker 1: I asked my aunt about it, she goes, oh, no, no,
Speaker 1: we never asked questions that would have been very disrespectful.
Speaker 1: The one story that we heard was that she was
Speaker 1: sent to Cuba on an arranged marriage. The legendary family
Speaker 1: stories that then she was living with an uncle, this
Speaker 1: was her one relative in Cuba. There was a hallway
Speaker 1: where she would sit and play the ood and sing
Speaker 1: Sephardic songs, and that the man who became my grandfather,
Speaker 1: my grandfather Isaac, that he was walking along the street
Speaker 1: and heard her playing the ood and that was what
Speaker 1: attracted him. This is the sad part of the story.
Speaker 1: She married and she had four children, and my father
Speaker 1: was the third. After she married, she stopped playing the ood.
Speaker 1: She didn't have time to play the ood. And what
Speaker 1: they all said is that the ood hung from a
Speaker 1: nail on the wall. So the arranged marriage is kind
Speaker 1: of there in my book, but in a different way.
Speaker 1: In the book it becomes a punishment. But I definitely
Speaker 1: felt very close to her in writing the book, as
Speaker 1: I was thinking about her so much and trying to
Speaker 1: imagine her youth and Turkey and what it would have
Speaker 1: been like to have gone to Cuba from Turkey as
Speaker 1: a young girl. So it was just great to create
Speaker 1: a life for her in the story. I wrote most
Speaker 1: of it at my desk at my home in ann Arbor, Michigan,
Speaker 1: and I have an altar right next to my desk,
Speaker 1: and usually Jewish people don't have alters, so I can't
Speaker 1: call it exactly an alter, but it's like an altar.
Speaker 1: It has images of all of my ancestors and relatives
Speaker 1: who have departed, so both grandparents, my great grandparents, other relatives.
Speaker 1: A friend who passed away this past year as well.
Speaker 1: I've got something of his there too, and candles and
Speaker 1: so on. And I'm writing, I'm always like looking at
Speaker 1: the pictures of those ancestors. So I do feel very
Speaker 1: connected to the ancestors, and I don't forget them, and
Speaker 1: their spirits are very important to me, and I think
Speaker 1: about them all the time. So maybe that energy somehow
Speaker 1: travels through the writing. It's like talking about intangible heritage,
Speaker 1: things like songs or poems or stories or traditions that
Speaker 1: are passed on. There isn't like a palpable artifact, maybe,
Speaker 1: but it's still very real. So like in this book
Speaker 1: and across so many seas, it's like these songs that
Speaker 1: got passed on. It's an intangible heritage, you know, as
Speaker 1: opposed to say the Sephardic Museum, that's a tangible heritage.
Speaker 1: But it was a fourteenth century synagogue, and you know,
Speaker 1: beneath all the blaster and all the walls that they
Speaker 1: built around it, that material remained, and that's a tangible heritage.
Speaker 1: That's an actual synagogue that existed all those centuries ago,
Speaker 1: but it's now a museum.
Speaker 5: Roots work as an anthropologist often focuses on connecting women
Speaker 5: across generations, cultures, and borders, especially Cuban women on and
Speaker 5: off the island. I've never been to Cuba myself, but
Speaker 5: ruth stories make me feel like I have. You know,
Speaker 5: I don't really feel like I have an ancestral home.
Speaker 5: You know, I'm not in a position where I can
Speaker 5: go and live in Cuba. I'm not in a position
Speaker 5: where I can.
Speaker 4: Go and live in you know, La Hi, La Canadias
Speaker 4: in Spain, where part of my family's originally from as
Speaker 4: far as I know. But this apartment where I spent
Speaker 4: my childhood, that's like the most concrete version of my
Speaker 4: ancestral home.
Speaker 1: No, that makes sense, And I think, you know, the
Speaker 1: idea of what an ancestral home is can also shift
Speaker 1: over time, Like this is what you feel now, At
Speaker 1: a later stage of your life, you might feel something different.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what I feel.
Speaker 1: This is twenty five, what you feel at twenty five,
Speaker 1: and when you're sixty five you might feel something different.
Speaker 1: And so think keep that in mind, and I think
Speaker 1: with my book, you know, I really wanted to think
Speaker 1: about Sephardic identity and take it back to fourteen ninety two.
Speaker 1: It probably goes back much before that, but it was
Speaker 1: this idea of Jewish people lived in Spain for over
Speaker 1: a thousand years, you know, it's really incredible.
Speaker 3: It's a long time.
Speaker 1: They were really part of the history of Spain, and
Speaker 1: sometimes people don't know that, and that was one of
Speaker 1: the things that I wanted to address in the book.
Speaker 1: And you know, and to go that far back in
Speaker 1: a lot of Spaniards will tell you that they think
Speaker 1: they might have Jewish ancestry rights because the Combersos were
Speaker 1: Jewish people that converted to Catholicism and they converted in
Speaker 1: order to be able to stay And so to me,
Speaker 1: that's so fascinating and that people now think about how
Speaker 1: we have these connections with one another. Sephardic Jews are
Speaker 1: connected to Spaniards in some way because we share this history.
Speaker 1: So that's been so interesting to me that there's kind
Speaker 1: of this we've sort of come full circle in this
Speaker 1: is there's been a kind of reconciliation.
Speaker 5: As it often does. Our conversation turned to dance. The
Speaker 5: first time I met Ruth felt like writing an essay
Speaker 5: in real time about the parallel experiences of writing and dancing.
Speaker 5: Each word is a step, each set of moves is
Speaker 5: a paragraph. The way you connect them is what gives
Speaker 5: you your style. And some conversations flow so easily they
Speaker 5: feel like a dance. And even though we've danced together,
Speaker 5: I never asked Ruth why she started dancing in the
Speaker 5: first place.
Speaker 1: Oh, I love dancing. Well, you know, I was a
Speaker 1: child who had a broken leg for a long time,
Speaker 1: and I was in a body cast for a year
Speaker 1: when I was ten, and I write about that in
Speaker 1: my first novel for young readers, Lucky Broken Girl. So
Speaker 1: I was lucky and I was broken, and that's very
Speaker 1: much something that informed I think.
Speaker 3: The person I became.
Speaker 1: I was a very active girl before this car accident,
Speaker 1: before the body cast, and then after the body cast
Speaker 1: and learning to walk again, I became much more afraid.
Speaker 3: That I would get hurt again. I didn't want to run.
Speaker 1: I really stopped doing a lot of physical activities and
Speaker 1: became more of a reader and more contemplative. And similarly
Speaker 1: in college, at through graduate school, I just didn't really
Speaker 1: do a lot of exercise or dancing. For that matter,
Speaker 1: and I think it was really when I was pregnant
Speaker 1: at the age of twenty nine, pregnant with my son,
Speaker 1: the one child I had. That was when I started
Speaker 1: to want to do exercise. I started doing aerobics and
Speaker 1: things like that to stay in shape during the pregnancy.
Speaker 1: And then after after I had the baby, that was
Speaker 1: when I think that was when I started taking dance classes.
Speaker 1: And then I discovered rouela de casino, which I love.
Speaker 1: Would you dance in a circle you change partners with?
Speaker 1: I love that, and I was coming every time I
Speaker 1: would come to Miami, I would dance another way that
Speaker 1: here in Miami, and that was great. So I did
Speaker 1: that for a long time, and then for a while,
Speaker 1: for many many years. I haven't danced now for the
Speaker 1: last four years, but for many many years I danced tango,
Speaker 1: and I love tango.
Speaker 5: Through dance, Ruth has witnessed the themes of her writing
Speaker 5: in her own life as a member of the Cuban
Speaker 5: and Jewish diasporas. Her relationship with tango embodies that story.
Speaker 1: My maternal grandfather was actually supposed to go to Argentina
Speaker 1: instead of Cuba, but he somehow got on the wrong boat,
Speaker 1: so he ended up in Cuba, and his sister was
Speaker 1: waiting for him in Argentina.
Speaker 3: So the descendants of that sister still live.
Speaker 1: In Buenos Aires, and when I've been to Buenosidas, I've
Speaker 1: seen them. So I have these cousins, so I feel
Speaker 1: like I have a connection also to the Argentine culture
Speaker 1: and citango. So tango and salsa very important. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think they've just helped me to feel comfortable in
Speaker 1: my body.
Speaker 5: I get what she means. Salsa also helps me building
Speaker 5: relationship with my body as an adult woman and not
Speaker 5: a teenager in a leotard. I grew up dancing ballet
Speaker 5: and still associated dance with structure and discipline instead of
Speaker 5: creative expression. When I started salsa dancing, though, I realized
Speaker 5: that technique is important, but dancers who get stuck there
Speaker 5: can't experience meaningful connections with themselves or their dance partners.
Speaker 1: The dancers that start telling you what to do one, two, three, five,
Speaker 1: six seven, those are the worst dancers. The best dancers
Speaker 1: know how to lead you gently and gracefully with you, know,
Speaker 1: with their hands, with their body movements, with their shoulders,
Speaker 1: with how they look at you. That's the way to dance,
Speaker 1: and so you're also kind of cultivating this other way
Speaker 1: of communicating, which is also important. You could dance with
Speaker 1: somebody you hate, but you could potentially understand each other
Speaker 1: through dance. So if we come back to the theme
Speaker 1: of understanding and empathy, you can understand each other through dance.
Speaker 5: I should have known that Ruth is a dance before
Speaker 5: we even met her. Writing touches your hand, makes eye contact, leads,
Speaker 5: and follows. I remember thinking that the first time I
Speaker 5: read her work.
Speaker 1: Despite all the ways I've interrogated anthropology, despite not always
Speaker 1: feeling proud of being an anthropologist, I am an anthropologist
Speaker 1: at heart. An anthropologist not in the credential or academic sense,
Speaker 1: but in the sense that I have cared and will
Speaker 1: always care about vulnerability as a shared experience and the
Speaker 1: way profound and unfathomable encounters can take place between strangers
Speaker 1: that will change our lives forever.
Speaker 5: Ruth has changed my life forever, and I can tell
Speaker 5: you that, Seamed Bena. But that's enough talking for now.
Speaker 6: We have a salsa class to get to.
Speaker 2: This episode was produced by Alisa Baena and edited by
Speaker 2: Andrea Lopez Grusado and Alejandra Salasad.
Speaker 3: It was mixed by Stephanie Lebou.
Speaker 2: The Latino USA team includes Victoria Estrada, Renaldo Leanos, Junior,
Speaker 2: Jodi mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Mike Sargent, Noor Saudi and
Speaker 2: Nancy Trujillo. Pannile Ramirez is our co executive producer. Our
Speaker 2: senior engineer is Julia Caruso. Our marketing manager is Luis Luna.
Speaker 2: Our theme music was composed by Zenie Robinos, I'm your
Speaker 2: host and co executive producer Marienno Posa. Join us again
Speaker 2: on our next episode. In the meantime, look for us
Speaker 2: on all of your social media and I'll see you
Speaker 2: on Instai ram Jadu, savez by bye.
Speaker 7: Latino USA is made possible in part by the Ford Foundation,
Speaker 7: working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide,
Speaker 7: the Heising Simons Foundation Unlocking knowledge, opportunity and possibilities more
Speaker 7: at hsfoundation dot org, and the John D. And Catherine T.
Speaker 7: MacArthur Foundation