My Fulbright Life
Transcript For: Current Fulbright mtvU Grantee Katie Day Good to Mexico
February 19, 2009
Current Fulbright mtvU Grantee, Katie Day Good, discusses her Fulbright Experience to Mexico.
My Fulbright Life: Katie Day Good, mtvU Mexico
Lee: Hello and welcome to My
Fulbright Life. I’m your host Lee Rivers and today I am joined by Katie Day
Good. Katie is one of 5 grantees participating in the Fulbright-mtvU fellowship
program. She is currently studying in Mexico
City and today she’s going to share a little bit about
her experiences with us. Thanks for joining us Katie.
Katie: My pleasure, Lee.
Lee: For out listeners who are not
familiar with the Fulbright-mtvU Fellowship, it’s a collaboration between the
U.S. Department of State, the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, as well
mtvU which is the 24 hour college network. And the focus of the program is to
promote the power of music as a global force for mutual understanding. And then the students, the 5 grantees this
year, are conducting research abroad and they’re doing it for a full academic
year and they’re designing projects of their own design. And what they’re doing
is, these projects that they’re working on, are all centered around the aspect
of international music culture.
And so, we have a
deadline coming up here soon for the Fulbright applications for the mtvU
awards, and that’s going to be on March 1. And so you can check out our
website, which is at www.fulbright.mtvu.com.
Once again www.fulbright.mtvu.com. And you can go online and check out videos,
blogs and podcasts from all 5 of our grantees.
So, Katie, tell us,
where in Mexico City are you and give us a little bit of background about your
program and what led you to apply.
Katie: Well, I am right in the heart of Mexico City, just a 20
minute bus ride away from the historic downtown. And I live in one of the
business hubs of the city, there’s actually many of them. I live right across
the street from the American Embassy, and also next to Mexico
City’s equivalent of Central Park,
a giant forest that’s a great place to walk around and get some fresh air which
is hard to come by in this city.
And I came here because
I was interested in students, young people who live in cities, so cosmopolitan
people who are definitely a part of the globalization process in a developing
country like Mexico, who are interested in country music, basically, or
traditional forms of music, music that was being played in Mexico before the
arrival of rock and roll in the late 1950s. So I wanted to come here and study
at a folk music school they have here to meet kids and understand what their
goals are by taking up what some would call a decreasingly popular musical
style.
Lee: Excellent. And what
institution are you currently studying at?
Katie: The school is called La Casa de
la Musica Mexicana, that’s the House of Mexican Music. They teach all different
kinds of music there, the theme that sort of unites all these different forms
is that musica popular de mexicana, popular Mexican music. Music that isn’t
necessarily commercial, it’s songs that describe the way that Mexicans feel and
are kind of wrapped up with this sense of national identity. So, pop music
doesn’t fall under that umbrella, raggaeton and cumbia and salsa does not fall
under that umbrella because that’s a sort of pan-Latin America favorite music. So these
are Mexican specific styles.
Lee: That’s great. And so with your
background you said you were Anthropology as well as Asian Studies, this was
your background?
Katie: Well, actually Asian Studies was
one of my minors. My other minor that I’m utilizing more here is International
Studies. Yeah, Anthropology was my major in college and I also got really into
radio production in college because my school, Loyola University Chicago, has
an excellent community radio station on its campus and so I got involved there
and I started reporting on some immigrant organizations in my neighborhood in
Chicago. And that got me interested in the craft of using radio to sort of
explore anthropological topics which is a big aspect of my application for this
mtvU Fulbright.
Lee: Did you have a music background
at all? Or is this something new that you’ve just kind of jumped into?
Katie: No, I definitely have a musical
background. My parents are folk musicians and my siblings and I were raised
kind of playing all different kinds of instruments. I primarily played piano
and then I took up the guitar and the Celtic harp in high school and so we’ve
always played together. The one think we all have in common is that we never
really liked to study music. We were much more of the folk orientation and I’ve
played in several bands in Michigan and Chicago and have recorded
a lot so, while I’ve definitely been serious about school, music has been that
hobby that has gotten me through stressful times, and has always been my
outlet.
Lee: That’s great, and what you
said there really does speak to the focus and the theme of what these mtvU-Fulbright
awards are and that’s really to promote the power of music as a global force
for mutual understanding.
Did you have any
background in the Spanish language before you left? What was your level of
proficiency before leaving Chicago for Mexico City?
Katie: I was lucky to go on a high
school exchange to Ecuador
in 10th grade. I had spent a year in Ecuador and learned Ecuadorian
Spanish and went to school there, so… I was definitely rusty since it was 8
years between my trips to Latin America and I had never been to Mexico
before so I kind of had to learn Spanish all over again coming here because the
Spanish is very different. But also, having lived in Chicago,
and lived in 2 of the most Mexican neighborhoods in Chicago, I had chances to sort of listen and
try it out at the stores and stuff like that, so I kind of knew what was
coming.
Lee: That’s great. So tell us a
little bit about a typical day in your life. What would it be like to walk in
your shoes for a day or two?
Katie: Well, I get up in the morning and
I make a pretty good breakfast because produce here is phenomenal, and cheap
and available everywhere. And then I usually go to a café to study. So I’ll
take my computer and spend the first half of my day reading and listening to
some of the tapes that I’ve recorded, and maybe editing. I’ve been working on
editing all of the tape that I’ve recorded over the last semester into a series
of three portraits of students at the school. And then in the afternoon I have
music class so I go take a bus down Paseo de la Reforma which is the main
street in Mexico City
and it takes me directly to the music school, and it’s located with most of the
historic downtown. It’s in kind of a run down part of town, but they’re trying
to renovate it now. It’s known as sort of a musical zone in the city. It’s
right by this very famous plaza and you can go and you can rent mariachi bands
at night to serenade you or to follow you somewhere and serenade somebody. So
the school is situated right in that zone. And then I stay at school for 4
hours- that’s how long a day of classes is- and I’ll have 2 workshops. First
I’ll have mariachi for 2 hours and I’ll play guitar in the mariachi and that’s
an ensemble class so I share this classroom with students playing all different
instruments in the mariachi bands. And then my second workshop is Mexican song.
So in that class we just, we warm up and then we learn new Mexican songs. And
in the last couple of months we have just been gearing up for the annual
Christmas concert. So we were focusing on Christmas material of which there is
a mind boggling amount!
Lee: Is that right?
Katie: So that was a really interesting
experience. And then I come home and usually work until pretty late, or go out.
There’s a lot to do in the city- concerts, movies. And there’s also a huge
Fulbright community here, too. So I hang out with them and some of my other
friends from the neighborhood.
Lee: And so if you were to pull a
highlight just from your experience so far, just something that really jumps
out at you as a snapshot, what would it be and why?
Katie: I would say that the highlight
for me was waiting backstage for the Christmas concert. That was sort of the
culmination of the first part of my project because the project is divided into
2. The first part is looking at this music school in Mexico
City and the second part is going to Veracruz, which I’m about to do at the end
of next month and kind of start all over again. It was the culmination of
having studied with these students, and for a lot of us it was learning
mariachi for the first time. All of us shared an interest in mariachi and it
meant different things to all of us. To some people it meant a way to be able
to communicate with their grandparents better, and have something in common
with their grandparents if they didn’t feel they had much in common in the
first place. For other people it was just learning how to demystify this really
complex musical style, and learn how to play it. For me it was obviously a
cultural interest in this music that I had no way to learn in the United States.
So we all had these different reasons and there we were all together waiting to
go on stage and I really felt like I had a bond with these people who come from
such a different background from me who none the less would teach me with
totally open arms and were willing to answer all my questions and were nothing
but supportive of me for the whole semester. So that was really, my kind of,
choked up moment. And also, I was wearing a costume. I was looking at my giant
red ribbon, and my black skirt and my boots, and my guitar which I bought here,
my Mexican handmade guitar, and I really felt like, “Wow, I’ve come a long way in
just a semester.” So that was my personal highlight and is definitely the way I
like to remember the music school. You can’t be waiting to go onstage at a
Christmas concert and not be completely filled with a combination of joy and
excitement and nervousness. It was an exciting combination I think.
Lee: Yes, yes. You mentioned the
mariachi- speak a little bit about what are the basic ingredients of a
mariachi. What is a mariachi made up of, to give our listeners better insight.
Katie: Sure, yes. Well, a tradition mariachi
is going to have at least 2 trumpets so they can accomplish harmony together;
at least 2 violins so they can do harmony together; at least one guitar; at
least one vihuela which is a Mexican version of the guitar, it’s smaller and
higher with higher notes; and then, at least one guitarrón which is also a
version of a guitar, but much bigger and plays lower notes as an upright bass
would. Those are the must haves, and then you can kind of throw in, depending
on the style and orientation of the mariachi, you could have a harp, an arpa
jarocha which comes from the
state of Veracruz,
or an accordion.
Lee: What are some challenges that
you’ve faced and how have you addressed those? And in some cases, how have you
overcome those challenges?
Katie: Well, the physical challenges of
learning to play the guitar really fast, which I’ve had to do in the mariachi,
and that has literally made my fingers bleed. The good thing is everybody’s
bleeding right along with you. When we leave class our hands look like we’ve
been slammed in the door a couple of times but… So that’s been hard but you
definitely have the group there to support you. I’d say that all the challenges
I’ve found at the music school have been sort of counteracted by the fact that
everyone is going through them together.
Let’s see, what else?
There has been the challenge that comes with doing field work or journalism of
any kind, and I consider my project to be a combination of the two, and that is
just getting to know people, having the guts to ask, over and over again to get
people to talk to you, or making sure that interviews happen. It’s kind of
weaseling in to the situations you want to learn more about and making your
presence known. So I was lucky to be in this class with people for almost 4 months,
so we were able to build trust and sort of get to know each other. And that was
my aim with signing up at that school. That worked out, but it wasn’t without
challenges.
Lee: As I mentioned before we have
the application deadline coming up on March 1, and so, Katie, can you give some
advice to students who are looking at applying for the Fulbright-mtvU
Fellowship?
Katie: I would say that the best thing
is to make your application, make sure your essay is really tight, try to
squeeze as much information as you can in there, and make sure that it’s just a
really strong document that makes a good case for why it’s important to
research what you want to research. For me, the issue, the key issue of my
project was that Mexicans and Americans live side by side in the United States
but they might not have a lot of ways to initiate conversations with each other
and I think music is one of the best ways to do that. And I thought that if I
could show the diversity and the beauty that Mexico has in terms of music, maybe
that would give the American reader who looks at this website a chance to start
a conversation with some of their Mexican neighbors and peers in school.
I would say that having
an alternative is important too because once you get on the ground here with
your research, a lot of things might not work out the way you planned. So
making sure that your project is flexible enough to take different directions
if things don’t work out is also really important. So you want it to be
specific but you also want to demonstrate that you’re prepared to take it into
different directions and maybe talk about what some of those potential
different directions could be.
Lee: That’s really good advice and
thank you for sharing that. Well that’s all the questions I have. Do you have
anything else that you’d like to add?
Katie: This experience had been
absolutely overwhelmingly positive. I’m so happy that it’s worked out as well
as it has so far. I’m just extremely grateful for this experience; it’s been so
enriching for me as a person, as a musician, it’s an excellent preparation for
me as a scholar and one thing that it’s made me consider was to improve more my
responsibility as an Ambassador and that’s something that they tell you when
you go to orientation as a Fulbright scholar. You really have the potential to
tell people a story on the blogs, and then also when you go home. So that’s
something that has always been playing through my mind as I have my
interactions here in Mexico.
How can I remember this and how can I tell my story as an American and tell
their story as a Mexican. And so the fact that I’m swimming in these musical
circles now, and being here as a learning young musician, which is a group I’m
interested in studying, that sort of commonality has been a great way to learn
about each other and sort of exchange ideas. So in your application, you can
talk about the personal aspects of your project that are going to give you
common ground with your subjects. I think that’s another way you’re application
will be strong.
Lee: Well this has all been really
interesting. Katie, I just want to thank you once again for your time and
sharing your experience with us from Mexico
City. We wish you the very best with the rest of your
grant time there and this concludes this episode of My Fulbright Life. Thanks
again Katie.
Katie:
Thank you.
Lee: Good bye.
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