Sarah Holtz interviews Tonika Johnson, Photographer, Founder of The Folded Map Project

TJ: The Folded Map Project conversations to me served as a great model for the larger public to understand how simple yet awkward these conversations can be. Just asking someone, “How did you come to live in your neighborhood” really gets to the heart of the issue of segregation and how people, regardless of if they’re on the beneficiary end of segregation or part of the group who is most negatively impacted by it.

SH: Could you explain for us what it means for two people to be map twins?

TJ: They are map twins because if you were to fold Chicago’s map at its zero point, which is downtown Chicago because Chicago is on a unique reticular grid, the neighborhoods that would touch my home neighborhood of Inglewood are those northside neighborhoods of Edge Water, Rogers Park and Andersonville. That is why they are map twins and that is how the map folds by having those map twins actually meet and talk to each other which is something that segregation prevents from happening.

SH: I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how the Folded Map Project came about in the first place.

TJ: The project idea for Folded Map started as a seed of an idea when I was in high school as a freshman, a 13- or 14-year-old who had to commute from my southside Inglewood neighborhood 15 miles north to go to high school. I went to Lane Tech High School. It was on that daily commute that I started to really see the difference between how my neighborhood looked and the neighborhood that my high school was in looked.

In addition to those observations of how my neighborhood had vacant lots, abandoned homes, liquor stores, the neighborhood my high school was in didn’t have those things. They had cafes, boutiques, no vacant lots, all the homes are lived in. That stuck with me.

The primary thing that I was introduced to is the fact that the streets that existed in my neighborhood also existed in the neighborhood that my high school was in 15 miles north. I just thought that was fascinating. I would ride the train and think Ashland Street does not look like this in Inglewood, [inaudible 02:38] Paulina don’t look like this in Inglewood. That just stuck with me.

That’s when the seed of the idea was born. It pretty much took the rest of my life after that to really understand and learn and figure out how what I was observing impacted my daily life today. It ultimately came down to me understanding that it was due to historic racism and segregation.

SH: Our show centers around non-violent conflict resolution. It seems like these conversations between the map twins are a perfect example of that. I’m wondering if conflicts ever come up that you saw and how did you see them get resolved?

TJ: It wasn’t even really conflict. It was more so being introduced to a different perspective. It was literally people sharing their perspective of their neighborhood with each other.

Everyone self-selected to participate. They were open for this kind of possible conversation anyway. There was really no resolution necessary because the ultimate resolution that occurred was the listening. When you listen to someone who you’re visiting, going to their house, you are naturally disarmed. It allows for you to become empathetic in a way that you wouldn’t by listening to a news report or reading a report about disparity and segregation.

Being face to face with someone in their neighborhood in their home describing to you why they like their neighborhood, the issues with their neighborhood or not even having those answers, it just provides an opportunity for a different kind of understanding or awareness that really isn’t at conflict. All of their conversations reflected that.

There were questions that were obviously interesting and difficult for some to answer. People made mistakes trying to verbalize their preference for certain things in their neighborhood. In any other setting, it could have been offensive, but in order to even learn how to talk about this, you’re going to make ultimately infantile mistakes of saying things wrong, but everyone was open to being corrected.

That’s the space Folded Map offered for people who were really interested in having this discussion and amplifying the complexities of talking about segregation and disparity to people who have a different lived experience than your own.

SH: I think that’s great, and I think it’s so important now as we are so isolated just by how we’re spending our days that you’re providing this opportunity to engage folks on this very deep and personal level.

TJ: Thank you. I think it’s a level that is required now. It’s very clear that litigation, policy, laws, protests alone haven’t gotten us to where we want to be. For me, the missing ingredient to make all of those other critical ways to make change in a society would be more impactful if we included the person aspect, if we amplify the movements of solidarity across racial lines that have occurred throughout history.

If we look at those as possibilities of how we can make change for the future and understand that populations don’t have to live separately and vote their way out of an inequitable city, state or country, it means more when you connect with others and you become more empathetic, you become more aware, you become more knowledgeable, you become more understanding. You figure out ways to disrupt these large systemic issues in your own personal life and those things are important.

Those things are what contribute to movements. Those things are what contribute to you meeting other people that you might not meet because of segregation that you could actually have a wonderful friendship, connection and relationship with. All of those things are necessarily if we want to advocate for those who are most negatively impacted by our country’s inequity.

There are people who are privileged that care. There are people who are most negatively impacted by segregation that have solutions, but don’t have the platform to amplify those solutions. That’s why connecting across racial, geographic and class divides are important. There are people in each of those divides that could work well together and that’s what we need for change.

Sarah Holtz Interviews Adriana Camarena, artist and human rights defender

AC: I am by training an attorney, a Mexican attorney. I don’t practice here in the U.S., but I do use my legal background in various ways. One of them I have found is to do this community work accompanying families that have a lot of gaps in their ability to engage institutions such as trying to engage supervisors or lawyers or the DA and trying to understand how this justice system works here.

This is for me particularly important with a population like the Mayan community or first-generation immigrants where they were probably highly discriminated against in their homeland as well.

SH: Related to that accompaniment, could you talk about the altar that you hope to create for Alex Nieto, the young man that was killed at the hands of the police in 2014 in San Francisco.

AC: I am from time to time attracted to figuring out what other ways to talk about a story that engages people differently, perhaps even more emotionally. Also, Refugio and Elvira Nieto have been manual laborers all their lives, so they have a very good instinct about materials.

We created a video was shown on a small, old TV and recreated a living room for the installation and that living room was soliciting the fact that for Alex Nieto his bedroom was actually the family living room.

In that space, we brought out his uniform, his night guard uniform that he was wearing when he was killed by the police and some other beloved artifacts but also, I brought rocks from his gravesite, Bernal Hill, and put them in the installation similar to what you find on the Hill even today, a community altar for Alex that is built on rocks and crosses and flowers and mementos.
Together that created an environment of being in the living room with Refugio and Elvira just sitting there. I think that’s very poignant of what these families live with. They go back home, and they have these spaces where their beloved family member used to interact with them.

SH: I’m thinking about these different forms of grassroots support and how your work accompanying families ties into that and ties into how a community can begin to heal.

AC: My intent in accompanying the families is so that they feel that they are not alone. They don’t have to do this alone. They probably still have to go back to work and take care of their grandchildren, but we can walk this together.

Another thing that I’m always interested in is doing things that help heal their trauma. This might happen in different ways. This might be because they were invited, and they wanted to join in direct action. Sometimes seeing how many people show up for you and try to share that story with you is intense and memorable. It fills you with courage.

There are other more intimate moments like creating the altar with the Nieto’s which I also have to say that I was so proud of it. I was so proud of it because Alex Nieto was a young man involved in his community and he loved Chicano art and Chicano art culture and the culture of the mission so for her to be able to do that for her son was special and memorable.

I think about it as a grain of sand that we’re tossing into a pile, but as we saw this year in the middle of the pandemic with the rise ups around the George Floyd killing, it was the drop that spilled the glass. If you can call that peacemaking, that’s part of what I do.

SH: Yes, and I think the storytelling element of your work is so important too.

AC: In that regard, what we’re also trying to create is opportunity. One of the things that I learned from the Alex Nieto case and accompanying his family was that we might not win the legal case, but we will win the story. It’s important to win the story because then you create opportunities.

Just last week, a collective of organizations worked to put together a series of recommendations to the city about compassionate and alternate responses to homelessness where you take police out of the picture and we’re suggesting and recommending that a non-profit based new group be created to respond to specific situations where the police have no business attending unhoused people.

That’s an opportunity that was created through a lot of work, not just our own but a lot of work around homelessness related issues, housing issue, police brutality and absolutely working off that moment in the past year when people rose up to demand a different type of response to conflict in society.

Sarah Holtz Interviews Harriet Hendel, podcast host of Pursuing Justice for the Innocence Project of Florida

HH: It began way back in the ‘70s when I took my Master’s in Learning Disabilities and discovered that the rate of illiteracy in prisons is so very, very high. It begins in juvenile. They come in with an inability to read or a disability where they were never taught properly to read because of their handicap. It begins there and winds its way through adult prisons.

I promised myself then that if there was an opportunity sometime later on that I would take my skills into a prison, but the opportunity never arose until 2006, a long space in between my master’s and then. I ended up living literally around the corner from a maximum-security prison for 2,400 men.

SH: Was it difficult to convince the prison administration to let you start teaching there? How did you do that?

HH: I called and asked the warden if I could come and volunteer. They weren’t all that eager to have me there. The teachers were threatened by me. I don’t know why, but eventually, after pushing for almost a year, they said, “Okay, you can come and teach.”

I think that was the beginning of this journey which was very different from just being a teacher of children who had learning problems for 30 years. I ended up teaching 20 men in each class, three classes each morning. I was there three days a week. It was so rewarding to me to work with them.

What I was actually doing was helping them pass the essay portion of the GED. My approach to them was to read to them out loud excerpts from books I felt that they would be able to relate to. Because most of the men sitting in front of me were African American, I chose things like Obama’s book Dreams from my Father, Henry Louis Gate’s book, all memoirs. The reason for that is because I wanted them to understand that the pain that they were carrying around, and all of them had a story, could be used in a positive way.

Along the way, I discovered a book that was edited by the author Wally Lamb and the book was written by the women in a women’s prison in Connecticut. These were stories and poems and I thought they might like some of those.

I read a story by a young woman named Robin Ledbetter. The men loved her story so much that they encouraged me to write to her. I said, “I already wrote to Wally Lamb and told him what a great job he did with the women.” He was running a writing class like what I was doing. They said, “No, no, that isn’t what we asked you. We asked you to write to Robin herself and tell her that we loved her story.”

They shamed me into it and that’s exactly what I did. Then I waited four months until Robin answered me. The reason that she didn’t respond right away is because she had tried to hang herself in the shower and end her life. Robin had come into prison at age 14 and was given a 50-year sentence with no parole meaning that she would be up for parole at age 64 and not a day before.

But because of Brian Stevenson’s attempts at changing the way we treat juveniles and the kinds of sentencings we give them, things changed over time. Those sentences are no longer Constitutional.

We ended up going to see Robin eventually. She came through a very major depression and said she would like to meet us. We drove three hours up to her prison and continued to visit her for the last 11 years. We kind of adopted her. As a result of that story of hers, we established a wonderful connection to her.

She is now waiting for release by the parole board in Connecticut. She has served 25 years of that original sentence.

SH: That’s unbelievable. I know from when you and I first spoke over the phone that Robin is involved in a program at her prison that models itself after some prisons in Germany. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that.

HH: We learned that her prison was doing an experimental program for 18- to 24-year-old women. The approach was based on Germany’s prisons which the Governor of Connecticut had gone to see. He was curious to know what they were doing that was so different from us.

What they are doing is very, very different from our approach. The approach is a very humane approach where these men, who have been convicted of some extremely serious crimes, we are not talking about check forging, have a key to their own cell. They can decorate it any way they want.

They go to work off the prison grounds and they come back voluntarily. They go home for the weekend and come back voluntarily. The tone of those prisons is certainly set at the top by the warden, but the guards treat the men as human beings and they actually say so.

There are some films about Governor Malloy’s trip there. When he came back, he decided to pick two prisons to try to change the culture inside those prisons and he has. He is no longer governor, but he has done a magnificent job and Robin’s prison is the beneficiary.

Right now, Robin is a mentor in this program, and it’s called “The WORTH Program.” WORTH stands for Women Overcoming Recidivism Through Hard work. She is very proud of her leadership role and the staff. She doesn’t refer to the guards as “guards” anymore, she calls them “staff.” They work together collaboratively. That was never true before, never. She was Ledbetter and that’s the way they spoke to her by her last name, never, never addressed by her first name. Just that alone has made such a difference.

The idea is that if one of the women in the program is having a bad day or does something that is very unacceptable, instead of punishing her or sending her into isolation immediately, which would be the case, Robin and the staff member come over to her and sit down with her and talk to her and say, “What’s going on today? What’s happening with you?” This program certainly has changed the lives of the young women, but to me, more importantly, it has changed Robin’s life. Robin has said that she felt her own life had no value whatsoever, none, but now she sees clearly the impact that she has had on these young women.

SH: Wow, that’s really powerful. I think in general with all of the restorative justice work that you do, you figured out a way to take these stories and share them in a way that impacts people on a personal level even if they don’t know anyone who is incarcerated.

HH: That’s the most important thing, to be open to reading and listening to people’s experiences and stories and trying to educate people who maybe wouldn’t care about this topic. Then if you tell them a personal story or you have someone on your program who has their own story to tell and that story changes someone’s mind, then you’ve accomplished something. I think it comes down to changing one mind at a time. If you do that, you’ve done a great deal.