Cultivating Community Cultural Capital - a podcast by HTI Open Plaza

'The Tip of the Pyramid: Cultivating Community Cultural Capital' (University of New Orleans Press, 2022) by writer and activist Tony Diaz, known as El Librotraficante, was published ten years after Arizona officials enforced a ban on Mexican American Studies. Diaz drove throughout the Southwest on his way to Arizona—with a caravan of Houston activists that included poet Lupe Mendez, Liana Lopez, Bryan Parras, and Laura Razo—after the state banned high school Mexican American studies programs, thus outlawing curriculums that consisted of books like The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros; The Months and Other Stories by Helena Maria Viramontes; Luis Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter and The Devil’s Highway, among others.

Diaz’s The Tip of the Pyramid addresses the power and importance of cultural and community capital as a source of “self empowerment of our gente.” In this episode of OP Talks, he discusses the new book with Dr. Angela Valenzuela, director of the University of Texas Center for Education Policy, and doctoral student and longtime educator Patricia Núñez. They also discuss his activism work with the nonprofit he founded, Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, and the mobilization of librotraficantes to fight bans on Latino authors and ethnic studies.

Diaz notes that, with the national politicalization of school boards and book bans still taking place today, the need to work on behalf of the Latino community remains urgent. He shares a story about visiting the Mayan archaeological complex Teotihuacán in Mexico: While to some it is a tourist trap, for Diaz it proved to be a spiritual experience that made him feel both thrilled and angry. He remembers sitting on the steps of this ancient city, “having all these revelations in my mind” and thinking, “Wow, we have [been] brainwashed. I am standing on the proof of our gente’s power, beauty, intelligence, and this has been kept from me, and the fact that this structure here exists is testament to all that.” The media, Diaz laments, constantly fails to accurately represent the Latino experience: “The forms that exist, especially from corporate media and corporate publishing, do not fully convey our experiences and, in some cases, they just erase us.”

Further episodes of HTI Open Plaza

Further podcasts by HTI Open Plaza

Website of HTI Open Plaza