Perceptions of herself as a "half-breed" haunted the childhood of Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez, the daughter of an Anglo mother and a Mexican father. Parents of one neighboring family forbade their child to play with her because of that Mexican heritage. Although both of Martínez's parents were respected teachers, she learned "to think of myself as inferior, which is one of the worst effects of racism."
She attended all-white schools--an experience Martínez does not recommend. "I had been treated as weird, some kind of outsider, starting with the first day in school," she said in a 50th-reunion speech in June 1996. "At the same time, I had my father and his stories of the Mexican Revolution, which he had witnessed as a teenager in Mexico. He told me inspiring stories of seeing thousands of campesinos from rural areas, where they were fighting for land and justice, ride into Mexico City on horseback. My mother also stood up for social justice, for human rights. So there were forces at work to give me self-respect."
Martínez said: "When it was time for me to think about college, my family contacted a young man who lived on our block, who had gone to Swarthmore." Richmond Paine '41, who died in 1969, and his family were her only cordial neighbors then.
Martínez's ideas about tolerance crystallized at Swarthmore, where she was, again, the only nonwhite in her class. Those years were "a happy time when I was aware of my aloneness--but not lonely," she said. Martínez does not recall much discussion about racism on campus. But "students were certainly aware of injustice generally," Martínez said, "which is what saved me and helped me turn a lot of buried anger and pain into action." Quaker
ideals, including the lack of hierarchy, helped her survive and fueled her antimilitarism.
In a 1991 note to Nancy Fitts Donaldson '46, Martínez wrote: "I've always had some very special feelings about my years at the College. In particular, I've associated it with a certain kind of social responsibility and even radicalism--Quaker style, but that's no less radical than some other styles. Somehow Quaker courage blended with my father's faith in the revolution."
Martínez was "determined to work for international understanding and peace" after graduating. To her, that meant working at the United Nations, where she became a researcher from 1949 to 1954. After several other jobs, she blended her political concerns with the arts as an editor at Simon & Schuster from 1958 to 1963 and at The Nation from 1963 to 1964.
Her activism then exploded with the black civil rights movement, and she joined the full-time staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1964. She worked in the historic Mississippi Summer Project and also headed SNCC's New York office. With the rise of the Chicano civil rights movement, Martínez moved to New Mexico, where she published a newspaper, organized young people, and launched the Chicano Communications Center--a major movement project in Albuquerque, N.M. The Center published her best-known book, 500 Years of Chicano History, a bilingual, pictorial history that is still a widely used teaching tool. Later, she co-directed a video based on it, Viva la Causa!
In San Francisco, where she has lived since 1976, Martínez continued striving for social justice as a member of the Democratic Workers Party. In 1997, she and a friend co-founded the Institute for MultiRacial Justice as a resource center "to build alliances among people of color and combat division." A place for honest dialogue, panels, and cultural events, the institute is "a dream going back several years," Martínez wrote to class secretary Sally MacLellan Councill '46 in October 1996.
Martínez herself served as class secretary in 1952. Although she enjoyed writing Class Notes, this 73-year-old who still rents--and longs for more bookshelves--felt like she didn't "fit the conventional pattern."
After resisting her parents' profession for years, Martínez has been an adjunct professor at California State University in Sonoma and Hayward and lectured on more than 100 campuses across the United States as well as for academic conferences, high schools, youth groups, and prisoners. "My goal is to be radical--not to offer textbook information," she said.
Martínez recalled with delight a football player squirming in a women's issues class but later clipping news about a woman's victorious discrimination lawsuit. "It's thrilling when I receive notes from students saying, 'You changed my life.'" Despite recent waves of reaction against women's movement gains and attacks on affirmative action, she finds "one bright spot in the activism of Latino youth."
Dedicated to "la juventud, the youth, and their revolutionary vision," her recently published De Colores Means All of Us is a collection of recent and updated writings about Latinos. This book is "rooted in a basic demand for respect," she writes in the introduction.
Martínez has published six books and numerous articles. Friends are encouraging her to write an autobiographical work next.
"It's liberating to have a clear sense of identity now and to be
among hundreds of thousands making changes in race and gender
issues," this vibrant activist said. Martínez no longer senses
that "something is missing" and thinks of herself as a "resource
person to move the struggle forward."
--Andrea Hammer
Even in 1959, Daniel Menaker '63 had a finger on the pulse. Back when tuning into Swarthmore's WSRN involved tying an antenna to a radiator, Menaker was the station's first deejay to play rock and roll: "I had been listening to it since school," Menaker tells me at his home on Manhattan's Upper West side. "I had this stack of 45s that I brought to college with me. And what I liked more than anything else was picking which ones would be hits and which ones wouldn't."
Getting rock and roll on WSRN no longer takes much talent. But writing and editing fiction "hits," which Menaker has been doing for the past 30 years, often does. And judging from his successes, Menaker's literary antennae are tuned quite well. After an apprenticeship in The New Yorker magazine's legendary copy and fact-checking departments, Menaker spent 20 years as a fiction editor there, working with such luminaries as Alice Munro and Norman Rush '56 and discovering many others. In 1994, Menaker made the jump to book publishing, becoming senior literary editor at Random House. His first book there? Anonymous' Primary Colors.
In his apartment overlooking West End Avenue, amid shelves of 45s and a foot-high manuscript ("a nonfiction book in disarray"), Menaker is modest about the role of an editor: "Any fame you get as an editor is really secondary because there really weren't editors until 200, maybe 300 years ago. Writing and storytelling have been around forever. It was only when art and commerce intersected that middlemen developed. Today, the same holds true. Because if I wasn't there, somebody else would be. But if Joe (Klein) wasn't there, there would have been no Primary Colors."
Although Menaker views the role of editor as secondary, he takes his taste, and his books, very seriously. The former he credits Swarthmore for helping develop: "I want three things as a reader. I want a book to surprise and hold me from the beginning. Then, the voice has to be interesting and unique. And then the third thing--and this is from Monroe Beardsley's aesthetics seminar--it has to be complex."
As a book editor, though, Menaker has to do more than exercise his aesthetic sensibilities. With 50,000 books published every year, he is the shepherd to his books, working to bring them through this vast sea of print to the right audience. Because of this, Menaker states, "most books don't work. From a financial point of view, four out of five books don't work. You publish for the sixth book."
Menaker's most recent effort was Amy and Isabelle, a first novel by Elizabeth Strout. He said the book will beat the odds: "It's probably the high point of my career as an editor, publishing that book. It's hitting The New York Times list a week from today at No. 9, which is very high, and it's going to go up." Menaker's excitement over the book comes less, I sense, from the odds against such a phenomenon than from the sense that this is an important book and the author a special person: "It seems small. But, in fact, it's not small. In fact, it's quite grand. It's about a lot of little things, but it's about big things like love and tragedy and families."
Being a writer himself helps Menaker understand his authors and better appreciate his relationship to the books he edits. "I get the pleasure of being a writer. It means I don't need that as an editor." Menaker is unusual among editors in this respect, having published two collections of short stories and a novel, The Treatment.
Released in 1998, The Treatment tells the story of a young man's humorous, masochistic relationship with his psychoanalyst, Ernesto Morales, a "short, bald, muscular, black-bearded Catholic Hispanic tyrant of East Ninety-third Street." The book received excellent reviews and will soon appear in England, Italy, and the Netherlands.
As might be evident from The Treatment's plot line, humor has, and "always will be" a big part of Menaker's writing. He may be the only contemporary novelist to cite comedian Mel Brooks' 2,000-year-old man as an influence on his writing. Reading some of his early humor pieces for The New Yorker, the influence becomes apparent. One of them, "The Worst," was a spoof of Peter Passell's ['66] best-selling consumer guide The Best. It included the worst wine ("Switchblade, bottled by Ernest and Mario Volpone, of Modesto, R.I.--back on the market in zinc throwaway cans") and the worst theory of the universe ("Jehovah's cousin Scott faced toward the east, shook up a bottle of Diet Pepsi, and sprayed it into the void").
In person, Menaker combines the nervous physical energy of Steve Martin with the neurotic "bloviating," as he would say, of Woody Allen: "Allen was in the air in my 20s. You just sop that stuff up. All those early movies called sick comedies. Mike Nichols and Elaine May--very big influence. Hilarious stuff."
Woody Allen, apparently, is still in the air. Twenty minutes
before our interview, I ran into Menaker, who had just encountered
two friends in the corner bagel shop. Like a scene out of an Allen
movie, we had interrupted him thinking "about who had the most
influence in life ... whether it was Attila the Hun or Roosevelt."
Menaker pauses thoughtfully here. "I think it's teachers. Because if
they teach for 40 years, they reach thousands of people and share a
little bit of something." As evidenced in his own writing, and the
writers he has developed and published, it is clear that Menaker is
making no small ripple himself.
--John Freeman '96
From her sturdy chin to her articulate hands, the 30-inch-high sculpture of Sojourner Truth crackles with abolitionist fire. A few feet away, that fire is not yet burning in a 12-foot-high version of Truth just beginning to take form in plywood and wire mesh.
Give him a few more weeks, says Peter Kauzmann '75, and it will.
Over the last two decades, the engineering major has carved out a nearly unique niche as a sculptural enlarger. Artists who are commissioned to create statues for parks and city squares--like the Truth sculptor, Tina Clark of California--generally render their concept at a small scale. Then they ship the piece to Kauzmann's studio, where he spends weeks painstakingly enlarging every buttonhole, every furrow of the brow or fold of the ear.
To do this takes precision, patience, and a passion for analysis--skills Kauzmann says complement most sculptors' more conceptual approach.
"Artists have an idea of what an enlargement is going to look like, but they would never know how to do this," said Kauzmann, standing in the woodstove-heated barn-studio a stone's throw from the restored farmhouse he shares with his wife, Maria, and their children, Christopher, 8, and Sarah, 5. For example, he said, "Most artists don't weld. They're not thinking structure. They're up in the air and esoteric."
Kauzmann's main instrument is an enlarging machine of his own design. What an enlarging grid does in two dimensions, his machine does in the third. The 10-foot-long device is like a compass that Kauzmann can set at any ratio (e.g., 4:1 for the Truth sculpture). As he traces a pointer along the jawline of the smaller sculpture, a pointer at the other end follows the same line on the big one. In this way, Kauzmann builds out the finished piece proportionally, roughing out the lines first in wood and wire. He inserts reinforcing steel into legs and shoes for stability. At last, he renders the outer surfaces in plastilene, a never-drying synthetic clay, and calls Maria, who works at home as a graphic designer, out to the studio. Together, they "point" the details; while he moves the compass over every curve and contour of the original, Maria sticks toothpicks into the corresponding points on the big one. The ends of the toothpicks let Kauzmann know exactly how far out to enlarge a nose, an eyelid, or a wart as he and an assistant work the final details in the clay.
For Kauzmann, the most gratifying stage is loading the finished work onto the back of his pickup truck (helped by an ingenious system of pulleys that hoists the finished product up on a steel I-beam) and "enjoying the stares of people, particularly toll takers," on the two-hour drive into Manhattan. His destination is Sculpture House Casting, which makes molds and bases, restores old statues, and installs monuments around the country. Kauzmann's work will be done at this point, but the Truth piece, like all his sculptures, still faces months of reworking by the artist, and several stages of casting, before it can be erected outside a museum in Battle Creek, Mich.
Kauzmann said he left Swarthmore clear only about what he didn't want to do: "I was petrified of sitting behind a desk!" That aversion guided him by default to his vocation. Returning to his native Princeton after graduation, he entered the employ of the hyperkinetic Alex Ettel, heir to a family that supplied materials and enlarging services to sculptors and, in his later years, a gentleman farmer. Ettel quickly saw that his farm's young handyman had the strategic mind and steady hand of a born enlarger. Ettel died in 1992, but Kauzmann has carried on the craft and continued his freelance relationship with Ettel's company, Sculpture House.
You'd think that, after all these years, Kauzmann would feel entitled to the epithet "artist." That's not a job he says he's ever wanted.
"For 22 years, I've claimed to be a technician and a craftsman but
never a sculptor," he said. "Artists are always looking for things
they want to change: The eye should go over here; the head could be
over there. I have no interest in doing that--though after so long,
when I look at a work, I do feel entitled to have an opinion."
--Ali Crolius '84
ALUMNI DIGEST / BACK PAGES/ BOOKS BY ALUMNI / COLLECTION / EDITOR'S NOTE / FEATURES /
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Swarthmore College 1999. All rights reserved.