Dr. Paloma Martinez-Cruz is an SPPO faculty member whose areas of study include Performance and Popular Culture, Borderlands and Indigenous Studies, and Gender and Power in Latino Cultures. In 2020 she was a recipient of the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award, which is presented annually for outstanding teaching by tenured faculty within the Division of Arts and Humanities and recognizes faculty who have exemplary records of engaging, motivating, and inspiring students, as well as making a difference in students’ educations. Dr. Martinez-Cruz will be using the award to fund a new G.E. course that will be offered in the Autumn 2022 semester, “Taco Planet.”
Dr. Martinez-Cruz has always been interested in storytelling. “From the time I could have stories read to me, I was hooked. I took to language and literature right away. I was writing poems and sharing them with my family when I was eight years old. It wasn’t something that I ever consciously looked for, I just took to it right away.” It was in high school that she noticed her school’s curriculum was leaving out voices from underrepresented groups. She encouraged her high school English teacher to incorporate more diverse authors into the class by writing an essay about women authors. “I wanted to understand and contribute to bringing more voices into the conversation, because I knew how it felt to be a child raised only on English children’s literature and Greek mythology. I knew the destructive blind alleys that this was taking my imagination and I longed to fire up something else, but I didn’t have the tools to do that with the curricula that I been exposed to growing up.”
This longing for more diverse stories led her to majoring in Spanish and minoring in Chicano Studies as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. “The classes that I took during my undergraduate years were ways for me to be exposed to the stories that I wanted to learn about - the mythologies I craved and helped me incite imagination. I say this all the time, but the work of the humanities is to address the imagination deficit disorder. I consider there to be an imagination deficit disorder because so many people imagine and operate under the false impression that they’re powerless. And I think that we need the power of story to understand that in addition to imagination, we need the critical tools and voice to write a different story for our lives.” Dr. Martinez-Cruz’s passion for language and literature carried her into graduate school at Columbia University. “My whole life I was ‘book girl’. I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t get into graduate school. I was really taken by the research aspect and the path itself has been a joy.”
During her dissertation research, Dr. Martinez-Cruz became acutely aware of the isolation that often times accompanies learning. She formed a dissertation group with other students to create a stronger sense of community. “People need to feel a sense of accountability to each other. In the dissertation groups, we established relationships that encouraged everyone to achieve their goals.” This aspect of community is also a key component in Dr. Martinez-Cruz’s utilization of performance-based pedagogy. “The exercises that I implement in the classroom are community-building exercises and they help students feel more invested in taking risks in the classroom. Once students have invested in the journey that our class is taking over the course of the semester, we can do so much more.” While the word “performance” might sound daunting to students taking a non-theater related class, Dr. Martinez-Cruz explains that it’s really about students incorporating their entire bodies into the learning experience. An activity that she often uses at the start of the semester is called ‘Five Directions.’ “I developed this activity based on concepts from Dance, Border Studies and Latinx Studies. I tell the students to close their eyes and face North. Of course, in Hagerty Hall, most people are turned around and have no idea which direction faces North. When everyone opens their eyes, they’re all facing in different directions. Then I have the students close their eyes again and I ask them to face their ancestors. When they open their eyes again, we begin a dialogue about where their ancestors are from. At that point, the activity helps us launch into a discussion about border crossings. The activity helps us take an inventory, hear each other’s stories, and reflect.” Another activity that Dr. Martinez-Cruz likes to incorporate into her classes is called “Living Alters.” Students create a set based on a book they’ve read or a concept they’ve discussed in class, then place themselves in the set and take a picture. Classmates offer critiques about the interpretation during the presentations. “I really like the activity because it’s a way for students to see themselves in the stories and concepts we’ve talked about in class. And the critical thinking part is certainly present in the activity, but it’s also something that’s fun and new to them. I don’t care if you can tell me what a specific author did, I want you to give me a unique take on that author’s work.”
Her interest in Food Studies was born out of an introduction that she would give when presenting her book, Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica: From East L.A. to Anahuac. “Sometimes when I would discuss the book, I would start off by saying, ‘Well, I mean, what do we have? We’re Latinas, we’re Chicanas – what are our intellectual traditions? If you guys have Plato and Socrates, what do we have? The nacho chip?’ And it would usually get a laugh. But then I realized that I wasn’t being feminist enough and I wasn’t being decolonial enough. Looking deeper into Mexican food studies was almost like an apology for that book introduction. As I explored it more, I also started to consider why jokes about Mexican food tend to get an easy laugh. It’s important to push back against ethnic defamation when it makes its way into how Mexican food is sold, how it goes into the marketplace, and the defamatory messages.” Since diving into the field, Dr. Martinez-Cruz has educated herself on the struggles of decolonizing Mexican food, steps being taken to advance the table-to-farm movement, and access to sustainably sourced ingredients. Her upcoming G.E. course, "Taco Planet", also examines many of these themes.
“I wanted to use the taco as a deep-dive into looking at what we eat and how it impacts the environment. Students will go into the city and taste food, but they will also be looking at how alternative food networks can alter the course of who we are as people who eat every day and the choices we make that are associated with food. The taco is coming from a Latino Studies cultural perspective because we look at the taco, we look at corn, we look at GMOs, and we look at the treatment of farm workers.” Dr. Martinez-Cruz hopes that the course encourages students to advance the effort toward more sustainable farming and food consumption. “I always point it back to the student, like the students who helped popularize Fair Trade in the 1980s. Now, there’s the Fair Food Program, and there’s so much that we can do in Columbus to help advance the cause in a similar way.” Dr. Martinez-Cruz firmly believes that focusing on making better choices about what we eat, where we buy it, and the conditions in which the food is produced can start a chain reaction that leads to more sustainability and a greener world. “It triggers a chain of commitments to make things healthier for the consumers, more sustainable for the world, and more dignified for those working with the crops.”
Dr. Martinez-Cruz’s “Taco Planet” G.E. course is anticipated to be offered in the Autumn 2022 semester. Check out the SPPO website as well as the Office of Academic Affairs during Autumn 2022 registration for additional information.
