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