Maribel L Alvarez

Interests

No activities entered.

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

Chapters

Journals/Publications

• More info

  James S. Griffith, distinguished public folklorist, pre-eminent scholar of the US-Mexico borderlands, beloved teacher, curator, festival producer, banjo player, and husband, father, and grandfather, died peacefully on December 18, 2021, in his home in Tucson, Arizona. He was 86 years old. He is survived by his wife of nearly 60 years, Loma Griffith, his children Kelly and David, their spouses Anna and Cesar, and his grandchildren Emile and Arwen. Known affectionately as “Big Jim,” partly on account of his imposing seven-foot figure, Jim is remembered by an extensive network of friends, students, collaborators, co-narrators, and colleagues as a “folklorists’ folklorist” whose generosity, sharp wit, humor, and unassailable commitment to centering in all he did the lives, voices, and needs of working-class, immigrant, and Native American communities, defined the quintessential ethic of being a public folklorist.“Jim was a great leader among the first generation of public folklorists. At a major university, he did critical, celebratory, effective—what is now called ‘engaged’—work, because he knew that approach to folklore was better as scholarship and in artistic and social results. He set a standard for merging in-depth cultural research, aesthetic excellence, and public impact within the region of his life and institution,” wrote Nick Spitzer, producer and host of American Routes, in a long list of personal tributes shared by folklorists across the country in the Publore listserv upon news of his passing.In 2011, Jim received the Bess Lomax Hawes National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) National Heritage Fellowship, awarded to an individual who has made major contributions to the excellence, vitality, and public appreciation of the folk and traditional arts. Although his work was noted and appreciated nationally, Jim's deep investment and devotion always led to the local. He spent a lifetime celebrating and honoring the foods, music, folkways, and religious expression found along the US-Mexico border, especially those of the Mexican and Mexican American, Yoeme (Yaqui), and Tohono O'odham Indigenous communities, among whom he lived as a neighbor in his home near the iconic San Xavier del Bac Mission in Tucson. Classically trained in methods of ethnographic investigation by some of anthropology's seminal figures in the Southwest, Jim repeatedly expressed throughout his career vigorous objections to disciplinary conventions that placed higher value on academic interpretations of ordinary people's lives than what they themselves knew to be true and relevant. In an interview recorded in Tucson near the end of his life by Abraham Cooper, a young local folklorist under his mentorship, Jim said that “one thing I kept learning over and over again is that you may think you know the answers [to the thing you are “studying”] but it's perfectly possible that you got the questions wrong.”1From 1976 until his retirement in 1998, Jim directed the Southwest Folklore Center at the University of Arizona and taught folklore classes in the English Department. Upon retirement, he led the fundraising effort that established an endowment for the continuity of folklore studies and fieldwork at the University of Arizona. In 2016, the gift was formally designated in perpetuity as the Jim Griffith Chair in Public Folklore, which I have the honor of holding.In 1974, with Loma and a small group of enthusiastic local volunteers, he founded the annual folklife festival Tucson Meet Yourself (TMY), which, almost 50 years later, is still going strong and is largely considered one of the most effective large folklore public events in the nation. During a visit to the festival in 2017, Cliff Murphy, Director of the Folk and Traditional Arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts, said of the event in an internal document, that “among all the festivals in our field that I have visited, TMY stands out for the simple fact that the demographics of the audience reflect exactly the demographics of the people on stage.” This accomplishment of equity in representation between those who “do” folklife and those who “watch” it on display was the result of Jim's relentless commitment to authentic relationship-building.Although he was a raconteur and performer himself, known for his spontaneous joining on stage alongside any and all old time bands, or his joyful dancing with children on the green lawn adjacent to a stage at TMY, his harshest critiques were reserved for forms of cultural brokering that only aimed at “entertainment,” forever reminding us that “for whom” and “by whom” must remain the ethical North Star principles of our field. His example of integrity and deep respect reached beyond the hyperlocal context of Southern Arizona. Folklorist and retired New York University professor Kay Turner said in the Publore thread: “Teaching Jim's [Arizona] work to students in New York was always a win. No one was better at bringing deep understanding to the profound intersection of landscape, art, story, and folk religion—as practiced by the people Jim respected and loved. He leaves us with many lessons to learn and keep learning.”Born in Santa Barbara, California, into a wealthy family of Welsh heritage, young Jim grew up always interested in “odds and curiosities,” he told me in an interview in 2013. His natural temperament as a child was one of restlessness and query, but a bout of rheumatic fever when he was 6 years old left him bedridden for 2 years. It was during those long days of sickness, solitude, and boredom, only occasionally interrupted by the magic company of books and the lenient chance to play with objects and house decorations otherwise forbidden (such as the intricate European Nativity set carved in fine wood that still sits on the mantel in his home in Tucson), that he began to cultivate the hybrid set of skills that would mark his idiosyncratic approach to folklore. Namely, he sought in all interactions the equilibrium between excitement and introspection, novelty, and demureness. Despite displaying a recognizably superior intelligence, his school days were rocky at best. “My teachers and classmates used to tease me by saying my interests were too broad, that I would never succeed unless I focused,” he told me.After high school, consistent with the expectations for a young man of his social standing, Jim enrolled at Williams College in Massachusetts. The Ivy League environment was not a good fit for the young man who often found himself taking sides with the racial and religious minorities and other underdogs. In 1955, he transferred to the University of Arizona to study archaeology under the eminent Southwest scholar Emil Haury, at the recommendation of an acquaintance of his mother in Santa Barbara. In Tucson, recalls his wife Loma in a conversation with me, “he found a world of acceptance and cultural excitement.” Taking classes with Professors Ned Spicer, Clara Lee Tanner, and Bonny Fontana, Jim discovered ethnology, the study of the living Native cultural groups of the Southwest. Laboring with great care and humility to build relationships with those communities, he gravitated to their expressive forms: food, music, ritual, and symbols. But even in the desert lands, his spiritual home as it would come to be, his academic performance suffered. “I came close to flunking out, but an immersion residency in Colima, Mexico, allowed me to finally practice enough Spanish to pass the language test for graduation,” he recalled.With a bachelor's degree in Anthropology, Jim returned home to Southern California and took a job as a teacher in a boy's private middle school in Santa Inez. It was around that time, in 1962, that he met Loma “at a high-society party neither one of us wished to go.” They married a year later and, in the Fall of 1963, moved together back to Tucson, where Jim had enrolled in graduate school at the University of Arizona.Jim completed a master's thesis in Art History on the Pascola masks of the Mayo people of Sinaloa, Mexico. He went on to pursue a doctorate in Anthropology, conducting fieldwork with Loma and two babies in tow, traveling the backroads of Northern Mexico in a Volkswagen bus, exploring the religious architecture of Tohono O'odham (then referred to as Papagos) villages. In 1968, a head-on automobile collision during field research broke his pelvis and led to major surgery. Undeterred, Jim recovered and continued his lifelong passionate engagement with the study of people and places of the US-Mexican border. “By then, I was hooked,” he told me. “By the early ’70s I began identifying as a folklorist, but this was a time when anthropology was being very serious about the profession. I was often admonished by peers and mentors not to ‘waste’ my time on artistic pursuits. I just went and did my own thing, played a lot of banjo, ate lots of tamales at Lerua's [a famed local joint in Tucson], and began making the rounds of musical and cultural gatherings all along the borderline.”In 1973, Jim, Loma, and a friend, traveled from Tucson to El Paso, Texas, to attend the Border Folk Festival, a celebration of Mexican music and other regional cultural traditions sponsored by the National Park Service under the guidance of the National Council for the Traditional Arts. “We came back terribly excited to replicate something like it in our local context,” Jim told me. “Loma was the loudest cheerleader for the idea.” The next year, they organized a 2-day event in the civic center of Tucson, divided between “secular music” on Saturday and “sacred music” on Sunday. To identify who should be invited, Jim intensified his local fieldwork, knocking on the doors of African American and Mormon churches, chasing for leads on small Filipino, Cuban, and Scandinavian cultural clubs that gathered in basements and school cafeterias, and attending the funerals, births, weddings, and any other ceremony he could get himself invited to among the Yaquis and Tohono O'odham. In the first Tucson Meet Yourself, in 1974, and every year since to the present, Yaquis have agreed to make TMY the only event where the Tribal Council has authorized the enactment of the sacred Deer Dance ceremony in a an open, public, and non-tribal setting. The first TMY attracted approximately 2,000 people over two days. The 2019 event included the participation of over 150,000 people and more than 500 artists and tradition bearers representing more than 60 distinct cultural identities and communities.Suddenly finding himself as an “event producer,” Jim began to delve into the analytical and theoretical aspects of festivals as an instrument of choice in the practice of public folklore. In numerous journal essays, book chapters, and panel presentations at professional conferences, he systematically elaborated a set of ideas that laid the groundwork for what many up-and-coming folklorists from the late 1970s through the 1990s considered the field's best practices. A folklife festival's essential purpose, he once wrote, is “to provide a dignified forum” for the rooted traditions and practices that help a group of people feel like a community and hence help them “create community” across differences. “A folklife festival cannot be fundamentally about booking acts from outside the community,” he told me. Folklife, in Jim's view, was nothing if not an exercise of democratic inclusivity by folks, for folks, among folks.In 1983, he lived a highlight of his career when the Smithsonian's American Folklife Festival organizers asked him to curate a special US-Mexico Border theme. Jim assembled a delegation of Arizona-Sonora artisans and tradition bearers to the nation's capital and collaborated with other border folklorists to narrate a story of the borderland's beauty and respect about this region that many, especially those in the halls of power in Washington DC, ignored. A then young Yaqui musician named Pete Yucupicio, today serving as Chairman of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, joined the trip. In 2013, he recounted the memory in an interview I conducted: “You know, the next day after we played at the nation's capital, that was the time when Nelson Mandela came to the United Nations. The newspaper headlines had Mr. Mandela on one side and next to it there was a picture of me that said ‘Yaquis Come to Washington.’ I kept the newspaper clipping. That was, to me, very historic for our people.”While ideas about democratizing the field of folklore studies endeared Big Jim to grassroots artists and racial justice community organizers, throughout his career, Jim faced his share of challenges, finding himself uneasy at times within what he once told me were the “do-gooders, university-centered folk festival movement boosters,” or, in contrast, to elite academic hyper-theorizations of what he understood were a people's fundamental right to cultural self-expression and sovereignty. While the power of his ideas earned respect and wide distribution among folklorists and cultural advocates, for a large part of his professional career, Jim chose to invest his time and energy away from the large spotlight of academic accolades. In my 2013 interview on the occasion of TMY's fortieth anniversary, he reflected on the tensions inherent to working as an engaged practitioner in academia. He told me: “I didn't have anything that anybody wanted. I didn't have a large salary; didn't get big grants. I always chose to fly below the radar. In this way, I was left alone [by University administrators] to do what I loved and how I wanted to do it. I was not a threat to anyone's career or ambitions.”As a teacher and mentor, Jim overflowed with joy, warmth, and generosity. His classes at the University of Arizona became legendary, filling an auditorium with more than 300 students who hung onto every word he shared, often offered with belly laughs mixed with a stern scowl that disoriented the listeners. His endless telling of regional nuances, many of which played on the bilingual mix-up of cross-cultural encounters along the border or repeated tall tales about impossible feats by desert animals and other dwellers, shaped an archive of local lore in Southern Arizona of which he himself became an iconic figure. Folklorist Amy Kitchener, founder and director of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, recalls Jim as her first public folklore mentor when she was an undergrad at the University of Arizona, circa 1985. She wrote in the Publore thread: “We spent a lot of afternoons cruising around the south side of Tucson, eating tacos, visiting local stores, talking to people, checking out sign paintings, murals, and talking about the myriad ways that people shape their worlds through expressive behavior. He modeled a kind of respect that I have carried with me—he would say that having respect is knowing how to be respectful in another person's cultural context.”Jim left an indelible impression on all who worked with him. “During one memorable after-hours music session at a meeting of the American Folklore Society, Jim asked me to fetch his banjo from his room. It was like carrying Thor's hammer,” wrote folklorist Barbara Bogart in the online Publore memorial. Sometimes, his ideas propelled other ideas that flourished far away from his care and oversight. Jim relished the work of colleagues from all ranks and in all genres, being as equally interested in English ballads as he was in Southern blues, the occupational folklore of irrigation technicians in Northern Mexico, or the foods of Hungarian immigrants in Tucson. He took it all in, always in his distinctive self-deprecating manner proclaiming that he was only good at certain things and not others. When I presented him with the idea for a new regional organization to carry out public folklore programming beyond the festival TMY, he listened intensely as I described the details of something I was calling (in classic nonprofit jargon) “a logic model.” Closing his eyes and chuckling, he then replied: “I don't understand anything of what you just said, but I love it!” At every step of the way, even as his health declined in the last few years, he supported the formation of the Southwest Folklife Alliance and never once withheld advice or requests for writing, teaching, interviews, or endorsements for fundraising letters. At the same time, he never stood in the way of new leadership, new ideas, or experiments that pushed the practice of folklife into arenas outside his comfort zones.Many public folklorists recall the legendary origin of the famed National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, as prompted by Jim during an early meeting of the Western states’ public folklorists. Jens Lund posted on Publore: “There was a discussion of possible projects the Western states’ folklorists could cooperate in creating. Big Jim said something to the effect of ‘what about cowboy poetry?’ and the conversation then turned to how to pull this off. Hal Cannon was the one who ran with it and the rest is history.” Folklorists Charlie Seeman, who was present at the meeting, and Meg Glaser, the longtime director of the event, confirmed the story in their response to the thread.Jim's suggestion about cowboy poetry emerged from his own exploration of the genre through his travels across Arizona. A consummate “old-school” fieldworker who once told me the best way to earn the respect of the people we want to get to know is to “show up and shut up,” Jim loved driving around to notice signs of human embellishment in the landscape, stopping at off-the-road joints, and knocking on people's doors to ask, with disarming sincerity, basic questions of the folklorist's trade, such as “Who tells the best jokes around here?” or “Which kitchen around these parts would offer me the best tortillas?” In attending to the small and specific within the grander themes of human existence, Jim played an important role in promoting an approach to folkloristics that centers vulnerability on the part of the researcher and gives radical accountability to the people from whom the “expert” collects knowledge. Whether in the classroom, at a podium, on stage, or at a party where he offered—with a healthy side dose of puns, proverbs, and anecdotes—a sizzling serving of “tacos de tripa,” Jim summoned us to embrace the joy that can be found in interrupting the normative categories. “Your allegiance should always be pledged, first and foremost, to the people who entrust you with their friendship,” he once told me when I faced a bureaucratic gridlock. At a tribute in 2015 organized by the University of Arizona Special Collections Library, former university president John Paul Schaefer captured the depth of Jim's legacy with this comment: “It is said that it takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a Jim Griffith to raise a village—and that is what he has done for Tucson.”During his lifetime, Jim was honored in multiple occasions for his distinguished service to folklore and the people of the borderlands, with awards such as the American Folklore Society's Benjamin A. Botkin Prize in 1998 for significant lifetime achievement in Public Folklore, the 2005 Henry Glassie Award from Vernacular Architecture Forum, and the 2009 Pima County Library Lifetime Achievement Award. Jim's legacy lives on through his hundreds of students, friends, and all co-conspirators engaged in the fight for public recognition of the beauty hidden in plain view all around us. For close to a decade, from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, Jim hosted Southern Arizona Traditions, a television spot on KUAT-TV's (PBS) Arizona Illustrated program. He curated numerous exhibitions on regional traditional arts including La Cadena Que No Se Corta/The Unbroken Chain: The Traditional Arts of Tucson's Mexican American Community at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. He also left behind a rich body of written materials through the Southwest Folklore Archives at the University of Arizona, and numerous publications, both digital and in print, among which the following books stand out: Hecho a Mano: The Traditional Arts of Tucson's Mexican American Community; Beliefs and Holy Places: A Spiritual Geography of the Pimería Alta; Folk Saints of the Borderlands: Victims, Bandits, and Healers; Southern Arizona Folk Arts; The Face of Christ in Sonora; Saints of the Southwest; A Border Runs Through It: Journeys in Regional History and Folklore; and his last book published in 2019, Saints, Statues, and Stories: A Folklorist Looks at the Religious Art of Sonora.Que en Paz Descanse, nuestro querido maestro y amigo.

Creative Performances

• More info

  • 2018: International Women’s Day: A Conversation with Maribel Alvarez, March. KXCI Radio. https://kxci.org/podcast/a-conversation-with-maribel-alvarez/• 2018: Why Doesn’t Tucson’s Mexican Food Scene Get More National Attention? The Salt, Gustavo Arellano. NPR, March. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/03/06/589626421/why-doesnt-tucson-s-mexican-food-scene-get-more-national-attention• 2018: This Hot Dog Just Won a James Beard Award, Conde Naste, January. https://www.cntraveler.com/story/this-hot-dog-just-won-a-james-beard-award

Others

• More info

  In the newly published report, People, Land, Arts, Culture and Engagement: Taking Stock of the PLACE Initiative, TPAC describes how “an underfunded arts agency in the nation’s sixth poorest city has managed to foster a robust and inclusive arts sector that is helping communities to achieve social change.” The report also provides a road map for other organizations and agencies to follow in developing their own creative placemaking initiatives. Established in 2010, the PLACE Initiative aims at “stimulating social dialogue, mutual understanding and a sense of belonging through the arts.” Though widely variable in their objectives, methods and sensibilities, PLACE projects generally reflect these core values. Roberto Bedoya, Executive Director of TPAC, stresses that the idea of “belonging” is especially important to creative placemaking in the Sonoran region. “Before you have places of belonging, you must feel you belong—to a community, a locale or a place.” He adds, “Through these projects, big gestures and little gestures collectively shape the identity of a place and allow us to feel a sense of belonging within it.”