Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love

5. The Insights of Everyday Scholars: New City Community Press

130 5 The Insights of Everyday Scholars New City Community Press Our mission is to provide opportunities for local communities to represent themselves by telling their stories in their own words. We document stories of local communities because we believe their voices matter in addressing issues of national and global significance. We value these stories as a way for communities to reflect upon and analyze their own experience through literacy and oral performance. We are committed to working with communities, writers, editors and translators to develop strategies that assure these stories will be heard in the larger world. —New City Community Press mission statement N E W C I T Y W R I T I NG was premised on the concept “writing beyond the curriculum .” Whereas previous chapters focused on New City’s internal efforts to support community-based writing, our goal was always to have the writing produced circulate across the neighborhoods in which it emerged and through the city, region, and nation in which it exists. Our vehicle for this public mission was New City Community Press. Through the press, publications such as Glassville Memories have been used in classrooms in the suburbs of Philadelphia and at universities in Indiana; and Espejos y Ventanas has become part of Mexican consulate and embassy education programs in Texas, the Carolinas, and Michigan. All told, more than twelve thousand copies of New City publications have been sold and distributed across the United States. These publications represent a sustained argument about who is an intellectual . For although the academy has certainly broadened its most restrictive definitions of this category, it is still the case that the store owner across the street or the electrician fixing a plug in a faculty member’s office is not The Insights of Everyday Scholars | 131 innately understood as an intellectual with a voice that carries wisdom and importance. In this way, to invoke Guillory (1993), New City Community Press has argued that if the university were to open up the means of aesthetic production, we would discover a formally marginalized set of working-class voices—across ages, ethnicities, and sexualities—from which we can learn about our world as it is and as it should become. In this chapter, then, I step back from being the single narrator and provide a partial representation of the collective voices that have been a vital part of our successes. The excerpts are taken from the following New City Community Press publications: Chinatown Live(s): Oral Histories from Philadelphia’s Chinatown, edited by Lena Sze and published in 2004. Through twenty-two interviews, the varied and complex nature of Philadelphia’s Chinatown is discussed. Espejos y Ventanas / Mirrors and Windows: Oral Histories of Mexican Farmworkers and Their Families, edited by Mark Lyons and Leticia Roa Nixon, with an afterword by Jimmy Santiago Baca, and published in 2004. This collection details the individual stories of the Mexican community of Kennett Square, a community of three generations who have migrated to work in the world’s largest mushroom industry, and relates their personal and political aspirations. Glassville Memories, published in 2002.1 This ethnographic project focuses on an urban neighborhood and its ability to achieve a richly realized sense of cultural diversity. Free! Great Escapes from Slavery on the Underground Railroad, published in 2006. Lorene Cary uses William Still’s Underground Railroad to capture the bravery exhibited by Africans as they escaped northward. No Restraints: An Anthology of Disability Culture in Philadelphia, edited by Gil Ott and published in 2002. This collection of poetry, memoir, and photography documents the personal and political struggles of disabled citizens in Philadelphia. OPEN City: A Journal of Community Arts and Culture, published in 2001. This publication brings together professional writers, community 1. As noted in chapter 3, Glassville Memories is a pseudotitle. 132 | GR AV Y L A N D activists, school children, and artists to consider key terms such as community and hunger. Soul Talk: Urban Youth Poetry, edited by M. Kristina Montero and published in 2007. Sixth- and seventh-grade students respond to the work of Luis J. Rodriguez, using it as a way to explore the nature of their education in an urban environment. Urban Rhythms: A Journal on Music and Culture, published from 1997 to 1999. This online writing project for students, faculty, and community members includes work that discusses the value and complexity of urban identity. Working: An...