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Viewbook [ CONTENTS ] The world knows Houston as a center for energy and space, and space-aged things. Its industrial history, from Spindletop to Enron, is well known to the world. And its sports teams are known around the U.S. by their space-aged names -- Rockets, Comets and Astros. But Houston's greatest asset, its diversity, is often taken for granted. Diverse cultures, celebrated traditions and eclectic arts are the very reason for the existence of the Houston Institute for Culture. We are working to raise awareness and interest in the people who make up our history and modern population, from Texas Indians, Spanish explorers, and settlers from the Canary Islands to modern immigrants from Asia and Latin America. The foundation of our state's settlement, Mexican, Anglo and African Americans, brought us to terms with issues of slavery and Civil Rights. The many refugees who have come to the Gulf Coast -- Cajuns, Germans, Cubans and Haitians -- have brought diverse languages and ways of life. Their traditions formed unique cultural arts, like Tejano and Zydeco music born from the introduction of the acordion. Our quality of life is revealed in the music of Houston artists Lightnin' Hopkins, Lydia Mendoza and George Jones. Our nostalgic past is disappearing on the Old Spanish Trail and in the demolition of old structures, like the Shamrock Hotel. Knowing our cultural history is necessary to understanding important issues, economic opportunities and strong communities. We are producing a Viewbook to promote knowledge and interest in the cultural crossroads of our city and region. This high quality printed publication will include photographs of historic sites and modern diverse activities, and reveal stories of settlers on the San Antonio Road, hardships on the Indianola Trail and the role of the Galveston port and Houston Ship Channel in forming modern Texas. The Viewbook is intended to represent all of the people of our region and, just like all of our activities, we welcome everyone's participation and support. The publication will not promote our individual programs, but will present many facets of our diversity -- historic and modern -- that we will be expanding on in all of our programs during the organization's development. By promoting cultural understanding and knowledge, this extremely high quality publication will be useful to many organizations and civic groups with similar missions and educational purposes. The Viewbook will be the first in a series of publications -- utilizing articles, interviews, research and visual materials from our documentary projects -- that will explore the multicultural history of our region and feature diverse Houston organizations and eclectic artists. | Volunteer Needs There are many opportunities for writers and designers to help produce this publication and others in the future. And there are opportunities for those interested in photography and video documentary to help produce electronic publications and document important interviews. We also welcome advice from community members who can help us identify interesting interview subjects for these projects. The Viewbook will serve as an exceptional educational tool in its initial distribution and we plan to make it available to other organizations for future distribution. If you would like to be involved in this, the biggest of our current projects, please contact the editor, Sheena Oommen, at sheena@houstonculture.org. To participate in the research for these projects, please see "Regional Research" below. |
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Regional Research [ CONTENTS ] On the edge of the Texas Hill Country, San Antonio, Castroville and New Braunfels have been our home away from home over the summer. We've been touring sites founded by the earliest Texans, like the San Fernando Cathedral, established in 1738 by Canary Islanders, and many other historic sites in San Antonio -- the San Antonio Missions, La Villita, Casa Navarro and the Alamo. We've been polishing our research for our forthcoming Viewbook at historical conservation societies and state parks, and taking photographs of German roundhouses, painted churches and Czech heritage festivals. From the German colony established by Prince Carl de Solms-Braunfels and Alsatian communities west of San Antonio settled by Henri Castro, we are moving our weekend destinations east toward Houston where we will explore the historic communities of the Stephen F. Austin colony. And we will also cover the coastal bend, between Matagorda and Kingsville, where we will attend the 19th Annual Czech Heritage Festival in Victoria, Goliad State Historic Park, and follow the Indianola Trail to historic settlements like Cuero, Gonzales and Gruene. We are planning interviews with local residents who hold a tremendous amount of cultural knowledge, such as Juanita Perry, a volunteer at the historic J.J. Josey General Store at Stephen F. Austin State Park. She is "75-years-young and never too old to learn." We also plan to interview Lalo Trevino, a vaquero for more than 50 years at the King Ranch. Future research excursions will take us to the Texas-Mexico border -- Laredo, Del Rio and Eagle Pass, where we plan to interview Kickapoos, tour Italian immigrant sites and cover the George Washington Birthday Celebration and Jalapeno Festival -- and as far away as the historic French village of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri in the Louisiana Purchase. For those who would like to travel with us through these great historic regions without working on our projects, we will offer several organized tours, including a week-long Texas Hill Country Heritage Tour in June, and several weekend adventures to New Braunfels and San Antonio later this fall. See the "Educational Travel Programs" below. | Volunteer Needs This volunteer work certainly can't be characterized as "all work and no play." In fact, this work is ideally suited to our interests, by promoting the fun and excitement of cultural discovery and developing better understanding of important issues. It is important for us to document these historic sites and people who hold valuable knowledge, and provide an inventory of these great resources on line, but we are also supporting the local economies by staying in the historic bed and breakfasts, and dinning at distinctive local restaurants. We've also toured several wineries and old German breweries. Volunteers are needed to make arrangements and help conduct interviews. Additionally, we need help making these great materials available on line and ready for publication. |
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Educational Travel Programs [ CONTENTS ] We have also experienced the much talked-about decline in travel since September 11, 2001, but it is related to trouble in the economy more than fear of flying after the attacks. Our tours have been down from about seven or eight per year to only two or three in each of the past couple of years. The tours, best described as educational adventures, are offered at the lowest possible prices so they will be accessible to people of most income levels and students. Because most of the trips take place in nearby regions, they are usually offered as road trips to keep costs low, with an option for travelers to provide their own airfare to a home base city, such as El Paso or Albuquerque, for each trip. The destinations we most frequently visit include: the Colonial Cities of San Miguel and Guanajuato, prehistoric civilizations like Tula and Teotihuacan, and Chihuahua's rugged Copper Canyon in Mexico; pioneer sites in the red rock canyonlands of the Colorado Plateau and the imposing Rocky Mountains; the Pueblos of the Rio Grande and Spanish settlements in New Mexico; ancient and modern indigenous nations of Arizona; French and Spanish colonial sites in Louisiana and Texas; Indian Mounds of the Mississippi Valley; and explorers' paths on the Gulf Coast. On occasion we venture out to the farther reaches of the United States, from San Francisco and Yosemite to Ellis Island, Queens and Nuevo York. Every trip is great and all of them offer unexpected surprises. In the future we hope to make these great experiences available to underpriveleged children, by organizing a youth camp in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona, an unlikely destination of limitless culture and history lessons. The trip we recently completed to northern New Mexico and the San Luis Valley of Colorado was a great reminder of how beneficial these educational adventures are for our travelers. The trip in early August offered recreational adventure in the historic Spanish frontier and educational experience with diverse cultures at the 82nd Annual Gallup Indian Inter-tribal Ceremonial and the 310th Annual Feast of San Lorenzo on the anniversary of the Pueblo Revolt. For the next year we are increasing the number of our planned tours. We are doing this by combining travel for research and documentary purposes with the tours and photography workshops we regularly offer. All of these trips are educational and we hope to encourage more people to take part in the important work we are doing. For example, several of the trips are organized for the purpose of establishing documentary work in Louisiana, which will initially take place in conjunction with cultural events and traditional activities that all will enjoy. Several upcoming weekend trips to museums and historic sites in South Texas are organized for the purpose of producing publications and Internet resources. Like the documentary projects, these trips will happen regardless of the minimum number of travelers or any required quotas to meet a budget. Though there will not be minimum numbers of travelers, there will be maximum limits due to transportation logistics. Request information by sending an email to info@houstonculture.org, or by calling 713-521-3686. Updates and itineraries will be available on line: www.houstonculture.org/travel | Volunteer Needs Coordinators are needed for each of the organized tours. The tour coordinator's role is to publicize the tour, make travel arrangements and coordinate the details of the itinerary. Please contact us to learn more about the benefits of being a tour coordinator. Research and documentary projects are open to anyone who would like to volunteer. Contact mark@houstonculture.org, for more information. |
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Youth Education Camp [ CONTENTS ] Camp Dos Cabezas, a cultural educational camp for at-risk children, is being developed with the help of community members from schools, organizations and churches. The Camp will motivate children who are at risk of leaving school by giving them hands-on experience with experts in an exciting environment. An important goal of the camp is to help the participants achieve success in their lives by helping them understand the important reasons people study fields like history, political science, geology and archaeology. As we develop the curriculum for educational activities offered by the camp, we are addressing issues raised by participants in our first series of planning meetings. We are developing the camp to benefit the community and educational organizations in several ways, including: as a camp we will operate to provide a positive educational life experience to children selected from area schools and organization; as a thorough camp other community organizations can implement to meet similar needs for their memberships; and, as a great educational adventure parents can take their children on for a family vacation. Once the planning is complete, we will operate Camp Dos Cabezas annually, with one weeklong session the first year and several in the following years. The selection process for students who are most in need of inspiration and encouragement will involve community members from schools, organizations and churches throughout the school year. Meeting updates and more information is available: www.houstonculture.org/camp | Volunteer Needs We need volunteers who care about the future of at-risk children, particularly those lacking motivation to stay in school, to serve on several essential committees to make the camp possible. |
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Photography and Video Classes [ CONTENTS ] An important goal of ours is to provide educational opportunities, such as cultural and social documentary courses in photography and video, to develop the public's interest in cultural topics and ideas, as well as to improve cultural artists' abilities to produce arts and media that explore important topics. After several successful terms of offering these courses it became apparent that we have to arrange them in a way that encourages more direct participation in producing relevant cultural art and social commentary. In keeping with the mission of the organization, we hoped the introductory courses, focusing primarily on technical proficiency, would lead to more advanced study in cultural and social topics, and critical approaches. The success of the introductory courses led to increased enrollment in those courses, but many class members were not interested in cultural subjects. The classroom program was taking a significant amount of time and other resources, but not serving the mission of the organization. On the other hand, weeklong workshops that combine students' desires to improve their photography and video abilities with their interests in cultural destinations and activities, suit our mission extremely well. We are currently not offering the classes in the traditional classroom setting, but we are pursuing more travel workshops and greater participation in producing documentaries. Workshops will continue to be offered for those interested in particular subjects, such as Introduction to Photography, Lighting for Photography and Video, Landscape Photography, and Cultural and Social Documentary. We are also preparing several documentary projects that we hope will encourage diverse community participation. These projects are open to experienced artists and journalists, and anyone who is interested and committed to learning. To find out more about these opportunities, please see "Documentary Projects" below. | Volunteer Needs There are volunteer opportunities with our documentary projects below. This gives volunteers with any level of experience a chance to participate and pursue their own interests. |
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Documentary Projects [ CONTENTS ] We have been working to preserve many cultural traditions and develop critical thinking about important issues through materials on the Internet for several years. While usage of most of the materials is constantly increasing, several subjects emerged as the most requested. Interest in the historical artists of our region -- Maria Tallchief, Lydia Mendoza, Huddie Ledbetter and Bob Wills -- is rivaled by requests for information about traditions of Mexico. In addition to the feature articles we present on line, we are moving toward creating vast visual and informative resources on Mexico, New Mexico and Louisiana, all of which impact our region in one way or another. The model for each of these sections is to include: community activities and voices; academic research and writing; features and personal accounts; issues and opinions; and resources for further investigation or involvement. Research and other documentary projects help us provide educational materials about regional cultural traditions and other aspects of culture through the Internet and electronic media, and to live audiences in educational presentations. As we move further along with the documentary projects, it is hoped that they will be very versatile, giving us many effective uses and means to reach wide audiences. An important goal of the documentary projects is to involve diverse community members in the efforts to examine issues in the community. Traditions of Mexico The Traditions of Mexico project relies on bilingual and Spanish speaking community members to help produce insightful interviews and articles to interpret traditional activities, like El Dia de los Muertos, found in Mexico and the U.S. Combined with photography and video, the project will evolve on the Internet and in live presentations. www.houstonculture.org/mexico Louisiana Project The Louisiana Project is a critical effort to document vanishing cultures and rapidly changing environment in the wetlands of southern Louisiana. Due to industrial uses of the riverways and other factors, land is disappearing at an alarming rate. The documentary project being established in our neighboring state is organized to involve people of different communities of Louisiana. And it will include writers and photographers of different levels of experience, giving everyone involved a chance to learn and have significant input on the project. The logistics of the project will afford us many travel opportunities as we begin to connect with community members who want to tell the stories of Louisiana through our lenses and recorders. www.houstonculture.org/laproject La Tierra Adentro The working title for a section we will develop on historic Spanish sites and traditions found within the modern boundaries of the United States is La Tierra Adentro, the Interior Land. This section is intended to cover traditions dating to Spanish colonial times in Texas and the Southwest, including the Fiesta de San Lorenzo and Pilgrimage to Chimayo in New Mexico. We are making an effort to feature artists who produce documentary work in our Featured Artists section. We are seeking artists to feature and a curator to guide development of the section. www.houstonculture.org/artist We also plan to develop materials on Native American and Asian traditions, as well as Texas cultures. We must recruit additional volunteers before we move forward on these. | Volunteer Needs Volunteers are invited to take an active role in our documentary projects. Opportunities range from identifying interview subjects and conducting interviews to helping with technical productions. As well, help is needed in coordinating project logistics, editing and transcribing interviews. Feature writers are encouraged to use the recorded interviews to provide articles on the Internet and to help us prepare for future publications. The Louisiana Project is being discussed through a listserv. Anyone who is interested can join in the development of this important effort by sending an email to mark@houstonculture.org. The documentary projects rely heavily on volunteer initiative and diverse community involvement. |
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Internet Features [ CONTENTS ] Use of our web site is escalating, which is extremely encouraging in a world where most trends indicate a narrowing of public interests. We are reaching 320,000 hits per month and may be on our way to 450,000 hits in October. Numbers of visitors to our web site are typically highest in the middle of school semesters, October, November, March and April. But we are also seeing a sharp increase in usage from home computers over university computers. These are significant improvements in our efforts, to bring interesting ideas and possibly raise important questions in a diverse community. Feature articles are seeing the highest numbers of visitors, with many averaging 2,000 readers per month and some (that are most timely and seasonal) exceeding 3,000 readers per month. Some pages are being viewed 26,000 times per year and we expect that bar to increase over the course of the current school year. We will be upgrading to a new server in October to handle the higher traffic and additional multimedia materials we are producing. With the move we will be provide a new improved contents pages for sections and the overall site, and soon afterward, a much needed search feature. The site contains articles about cultural traditions, documentary projects, features about interesting diverse people in the Houston community and surrounding areas, and information to encourage participation in cultural and community activities. A major goal concerning the site contents is to increase the diversity of contributors and the variety of topics. As many as 200 new pages will be available shortly after we move to a new server. The organization's Internet site is intended to include many forms of communication about different aspects of culture, not limited to feature writing and academic research. An example of this is the "Featured Artist" section of the website, currently exhibiting documentary photography by Bill Steber on Mississippi Delta Blues, www.houstonculture.org/artist. Volunteers who help us edit and curate special sections are performing a very important service for the community. | Volunteer Needs The organization's web site is being developed to represent many aspects of culture and diversity. An important goal of the organization, particularly to be reflected in the web site, is to involve people of diverse backgrounds in producing thought-provoking material for the site. An important part of that goal is to involve people of all ages, income levels and education levels, so that the site truly represents interests of the entire community. |
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Internet Resources [ CONTENTS ] Connecting members of the community with cultural events and community organizations will be the main use of our site. This has always been an important part of our mission, but we have had trouble living up to our own very high expectations. We need additional help from people who recognize the significance of providing this information for our community. Important information resources include a calendar of cultural events and related educational activities, a newsletter featuring cultural and educational topics, and an on-line directory of cultural and community organizations. The organization is developing many more cultural and educational resources to be provided on line, including the "Virtual Classroom" where community members can study historical subjects of the region, such as Cabeza de Vaca, the first explorer to make a written account of our region in the early 1500s. The purpose of these resources is to increase cultural awareness, encourage community members to get involved in cultural and educational events and to encourage participation in cultural and community organizations. | Volunteer Needs Our efforts to promote public interest in diverse activities require dedicated volunteers who will connect with artists and community organizations and promote their efforts through our Internet site and to local media. Editors and contributors are needed to help develop the following valuable resources: artist and organization listings; upcoming events and annual events; books and guides; and, research reference materials on line. |
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Library - Music, Books, Films [ CONTENTS ] The organization has access to several valuable collections that will one day exist in an important cultural library. One major collection features more than 5,000 CDs, representing regional and international music, which can be used for events, radio, research, and for other activities that develop community interest in diversity. We want to build better collections of books and films, and seek other private collections that will interest the public. | Volunteer Needs It is very important for us to catalogue and increase use of the materials cultural artists and organizers can access. |
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