Narrative Braids: Performing Racial Literacy (Interviewed by Gene Grant)

The performance that is the basis for this joint publication was performed at the Harriet Tubman Theatre at the National Underground Railroad Justice Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. The two of us, Christine Zuni Cruz, a Pueblo woman from the Rio Grande Pueblos of Oke Owingeh and lsleta in New Mexico, and Margaret Montoya, a mestiza/Chicana from northern New Mexico, using both our personal voices and our professional voices as legal scholars, enacted the theatrical performance, a conversation between two women of color from different communities with different identities. This performance experiments with both method and content. The method is a set of stories told at times to the audience and at times to each other; the stories use family and personal photographs, contemporary Pueblo music and Mexican mariachis,judicial opinions, cultural myths, and family stories. The performance is a conversation about ancestry, motherhood, personal identity, and race, as well as inter- and intra-racial conflict, co-existence and collaborations. Our stories are about memory colliding with history and the professional squeezing the personal. The law and different forms of in/justice are one strand in this narrative braid.