Photo by HCortez Media
Eighty years after chemical dumping began contaminating groundwater near the Tucson airport – and 30 years after remediation efforts began – a class of Applied Humanities students brought the story into the digital age, focusing on community efforts for water justice.
Jacqueline Barrios, Assistant Professor in the Department of Public and Applied Humanities, centered this semester’s course, “Southside Stories of Environmental Resilience,” on the issue of environmental harm from the Trichloroethylene (TCE) water contamination crisis, which dates to the 1940s and continues to this day.
Through an interdisciplinary approach, students in the course – PAH 420: Innovation and the Human Condition: Learning How to Improve Life in the Community and Beyond – work on analyzing the cultural, political and economic conditions involved in a community-based issue, identifying opportunities for improvement, and delivering a multi-faceted presentation on positive interventions of their design.
“How do you tell the story of water? It’s endlessly flowing and hard to capture,” Barrios said. “Whose story is it? There are so many wheres, so many whens, so many whos. All of the projects here do their part to try to tell that story.”
Over the course of the semester, the students were assigned readings, spent time doing archival research, reviewed oral histories, conducted their own interviews, and visited pertinent sites for their own documentation. Their final projects were to prototype publicly engaged projects that introduce new audiences to the ongoing story of environmental contamination and resilience.
“Altogether, the projects and visual record provided a layered narrative of the complicated histories of the watershed — from contamination to remediation, from depletion to recharge, from histories of harm to an interconnected ecological future with our riparian home,” Barrios said.
Photo by HCortez Media
HCortez Media
The 10 group projects included a time capsule, scavenger hunt, short film, mural, digital photography, a comic-style zine, collages, a water-saving campaign and social media campaigns on Instagram and TikTok.
Zoe Gyuro, Marty Weich, Megan Tierney and Jack Carpenter chose to create a digital photo collection for their project Water Whispers, building a website as a visual archive and map. They visited the Three Hangars site where contamination began, the Santa Cruz River and neighborhood wells and learned about the issues directly from community members.
“For our project, we hope to contribute to ongoing efforts to rewrite narratives of the Southside as more than a site of environmental upset, but a place of deep culture, resilience and creative expression,” the group wrote.
“We want to expose what’s been going on in Tucson for many years and what’s still going on with these wells,” Carpenter said. “The highlight for me was seeing these wells, going out into these neighborhood and meeting the families who are still dealing with this problem.”
For Tierney, who switched from being a business major to an Applied Humanities with an emphasis in Business Administration, the project was valuable for how extensively the students got to interact with the community.
“This project has been a lot more personal and I feel like it has had community impact,” Tierney said. “We’ve listened to different speakers and we’ve been able to take those stories and create something that can influence people and connect with anyone. It’s taught me a lot about the importance of community and standing up for what’s right.”
Photograph taken on at the Three Hangars, Tucson International Airport Superfund Site.
Photo by Megan Tierney
Gyuro said the project taught her about the importance of community effort and how different people, and different ways of interacting with people, can come together for an impact.
“If we work together, we can make sure other people within the community and broadly can feel comfortable expressing to one another when they need help, but that they can help each other,” she said. “When it comes to humanities, you have to involve yourself.”
For Weich, documenting the areas via digital photography was a way to augment what he found doing archival research in the University Libraries’ Special Collections. Three Hangars especially was an important area to capture, even decades after remediation efforts began.
“I really wanted to show not only how fallen apart it is, but how fenced off it is,” he said. “This is where it all started and that’s import for us as students to remember.”
Liz Soltero, CEO of the Sunnyside Foundation, said the organization is grateful to have such a strong and reciprocal partnership with Barrios and her students, who demonstrated care and respect in their projects.
“This has been a truly great experience,” she told the students during their final presentations. “The work that you are engaging in and focusing on has so much impact in our lives. Every time we talk with students, I share that this isn’t just an assignment, this is our lives. At the Sunnyside Foundation, we feel honored to engage in this way and have an exchange of ideas about the community we love.”
The course was supported by the University Libraries’ Digital Borderlands in the Classroom program, as well as the Research + Resilience Grants program co-sponsored by the Arizona Institute for Resilience and the College of Fine Arts. Barrios and her students collaborated with Professor Martina Shenal’s students in ART 343A: Traditional Photographic Techniques, working on visual storytelling. Previously, Barrios received a Research + Resilience grant for a related project, Documenting Resilience in Tucson’s Southside, in collaboration with the Center for Creative Photography and College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture.
The course’s final review featured gallery walks of ten student projects with projected slideshows and table displays, and two sets of lightning talks, with about 50 community and campus guests in attendance, including community activists who’ve spent decades fighting for clean, safe water.
Marla Franco, Vice President for Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) Initiatives, said uniting students and community partners in collaborative and innovative projects benefits everyone.
“These are the types of experiential, hands-on learning opportunities that are deeply rooted in community needs and desires that I only dream of happening,” she said. “Often it needs only a little seed money and an expression of belief in people. Our faculty and students activated this in ways we never thought possible. This epitomizes what happens when you dream big and bring your expertise and passion to the table.”
Yolanda Herrera, co-chair of the Unified Community Advisory Board, Tucson International Airport Area Superfund Site, and president of the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association, said she enjoyed engaging with the students and observing how their projects developed.
“I’m really impressed and motivated and inspired by all the students’ work,” Herrera said. “You are the solution of our future. Never forget that. And always remember, clean, safe water is life.”