Earlier this month, the Oregon Community Foundation and Oregon Humanities announced the names of four recipients of Fields Artist Fellowships. Each of the winners will be awarded $150,000 during the two-year fellowship to work on artistic projects inspired by the communities and cultural traditions they hail from.
Ernesto Javier Martínez is a 2026-2028 Fields Artist fellow based in Eugene. He is also an associate professor and head of the Indigenous, race and ethnic studies department at University of Oregon. Martinez is a filmmaker and children’s book author whose award-winning works provide a rare glimpse into the experiences of queer Latinx youth. He joins us to share his plans for the Fields Artist Fellowship, which include producing an animated TV pilot inspired by the real-life tragic story of a man and his child who drowned while attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Earlier this month, the Oregon Community Foundation and Oregon Humanities announced the four recipients of Fields Artist Fellowships. Each one will receive $150,000 during the two-year fellowship. Ernesto Javier Martínez is one of the fellows. He is an associate professor and the head of the Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Oregon. He’s also a filmmaker and a children’s book author. He plans to use the fellowship to produce an animated fantasy adventure TV pilot that honors migrant struggles and uplifts queer Latinx youth. Ernesto Javier Martínez, congratulations and welcome to Think Out Loud.
Ernesto Javier Martínez: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here.
Miller: I understand that this is actually the second time that you applied for this fellowship. What happened the first time?
Martínez: Well, the filmmaking business is a lot of grants applying and we’re constantly putting out fish lines out there and seeing where we might get some traction. The first time I was applying for the feature film that we are now in post-production and sometimes you get things and sometimes you don’t. I love the fact that I risked applying once again. I’ve been telling my students, it’s like you just have to keep on trying.
Miller: In general in life.
Martínez: In general in life, but in particular with things that matter to you, you just kind of have to keep on plucking.
Miller: So did it take something different for you to do that, to actually put yourself out there again for this?
Martínez: Not for this in particular, but in general, sometimes when you hit moments where you don’t get awards or you don’t get funding, you are forced to kind of think, is there anything missing that I’m not saying enough? Am I meeting their guidelines? Also sometimes artists, because we’re sensitive, we get to points where we wonder if the project is really worthwhile, and whether we should shift to another project.
Miller: I’m curious about that self description of yourself as an artist. Obviously, it’s true. You’re an author, you’re a filmmaker, but you studied literature at Stanford and Cornell. You became a university professor at the age of 28. You’re in academia and achieved that at a high level relatively early on. Academia, in my mind, I’m not in it, but as an outsider, it seems like it has its own language, its own rules, its own hierarchy, and often you’re focused on a kind of internal audience, focused on other people in academia. How did you make the decision to seek out other audiences?
Martínez: OK, now this is a great question. So in part, I think the issue is that, also as a person of color entering the academy, as a person who focuses on queer writers of color in terms of my subject area, the university as a system wasn’t always made to anticipate us. For example, when I started at the University of Oregon there was an ethnic studies program but it only had two faculty lines. We had to then build it into a department. Now we have twelve faculty lines. We have a PhD program.
What I’m saying here, though, is that you invest not just in your area, your field area, but you invest in infrastructure. Like you invest in, create… the university didn’t anticipate us, there isn’t just a department waiting to study this. And so part of that involves not just focusing on the academy and writing for the academy, it really involves community building. You’re constantly in conversations about, we call it how to be a subversive intellectual, and what we mean by that is to be in the university but not of it, means that we can do more things than what the academy says it wants to do.
Miller: Would you have felt that you had license to write a children’s book at the beginning of your time in academia or would you have thought, no, if I do this, people are not gonna see me as a “serious academic”?
Martínez: I had a bit of trouble there, and this is where being in the company of, so I study writers and artists, being in their company, organizing with them through, for example, an organization called the Association for Jotería Arts Activism and Scholarship. “Jotería” means, it’s a derogatory term in Spanish for queer folks, and we reclaimed it.
Miller: Like the word “queer.”
Martínez: Like the word “queer.” Moving around with this group of people, it became very clear to me that they were animating, in the scholars for the group, they were animating the tenant that you could be multiple things. And so we have this mantra, and we borrow it from Maya Gonzalez in San Francisco, and she says, “What if you didn’t say I am an artist, but you said I am the art?” Like the difference in that statement means that if “I am the art,” think anything that comes out of me that I want to express, there’s no need to fear it, versus that “I am the artist” comes with the baggage of, do other people think I’m an artist?
We’ve landed on this philosophy for people wanting to practice their voice in artistic forms. The shift might be really powerful to not claim an identity as a professional artist, but to also expand what artists can mean and that we all have access to some form of artistry in our work. What we mean there is something that moves your soul and where you might be able to connect with others who want, who need that kind of openness.
Miller: Can you tell us about your book “When We Love Someone We Sing to Them,” also “Cuando Amamos Cantamos”?
Martínez: Yeah, so this is a book that, it’s the first bilingual children’s book published in North America, so Canada, Mexico, U.S., about a boy who loves a boy. It is a children’s book that teaches kids about the serenade tradition, about singing to someone when you love them. It’s very personal to me because I grew up in a musical family. We grew up singing. We grew up singing serenatas, and as a queer kid though, I stopped singing as a way to pull myself away from places that I perceived as harmful or places that I didn’t think I would be accepted. I felt like I was a great singer. I loved singing, but I pulled myself away from it. The children’s book now is kind of me coming back, reclaiming this tradition, and sharing with kids now.
Miller: What were the messages that you got that made you pull away?
Martínez: OK, so one of the things my dad would say is “Canta como un hombre,” so like, sing like a man. What he meant though, now that as an adult, I have a lot of affection for some of the… what he meant was, sing with strength, sing with confidence. And he would say you are trying to communicate a story, you are interpreting a story. Interpret it, rise to the occasion.
I remember feeling, my voice was cracking because I was a teenager, my body comportment was more feminine than not, and all of a sudden I felt very uncomfortable in places where I was singing songs for men who loved women, for example. And I felt false. So when he was literally saying sing like a man, I basically said no, I’m removing myself from this.
Miller: And in what you heard implicitly was sing like a straight man?
Martínez: Yeah, but what I understood also is that I kept on returning to music, to my cultural tradition. Sometimes queer people of color feel like our way toward freedom is away from our communities. And as a queer kid, I knew instinctually that that’s not what I wanted, but it was my only way to claim some space for myself. And so the children’s book is my opportunity to heal my inner child, and also now presents a tradition to kids that also centers queer kids, like we don’t have that representation.
Miller: In the book, the father teaches his son about the tradition you’ve just described, of singing to the people you love on special days, or just to express your love for them. And then the son asks his father to help him sing a song for a boy he loves, and this is the next line in the children’s book: “Papi remained quiet after I told him. He sighed, turned his head, and looked out the window.” What’s happening in that moment?
Martínez: I love that you landed there. OK, so what we want to do when we write children’s books, and especially for queer people of color, queer adults writing for queer children, is that we don’t want to introduce trauma to kids, like things that they might not experience. We don’t wanna introduce them to things that might harm them, but we don’t want to dumb down the world.
And so what I’ve captured there is a moment that any parent who has a child who’s reading to them, maybe before going to bed, will notice about what parents need to process when things like this occur, when they have not anticipated how they might need to respond, when a child expresses their gender in a particular way or expresses a crush on the same gender.
Miller: You put this book out something like 6 years ago, right? But at a time when many books with queer themes were being attacked, were being banned, did that happen to your book?
Martínez: It’s interesting. I think some people perceive it simply as like, because it’s bilingual, because it begins with “Cuando amamos cantamos” in Spanish, somehow it’s falling off the radar, and maybe interviews like this will bring it on the radar and it’ll get banned. But I feel like what happened was that we got an enormous amount of support. So the Lambda Literary Foundation, the American Library Association put it on their Rainbow Book List, which means that basically like when you’re on that list, every library will buy it.
The Lambda Literary Award has a program for queer writers going into schools in New York, so we got just an enormous amount of love from teachers, from family members. And then GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, they’ve added it to their Rainbow Library. So basically it was surrounded by love in a way that wasn’t about just promoting queer kids but saying we know what kids need, we’re the educators, we’re the family members, let’s put it into the hands of kids and families.
Miller: You made, eventually, a short movie based on that book, and the movie goes deeper in some ways. It’s 10 minutes and so there’s a lot more possibility to explore the parents’ emotions and actions. I want to play a short excerpt from the film. This is after the son has told his father that he wants to sing a song to the boy he loves and the father has started to sort of process his complex feelings about it. Let’s have a listen.
Father: Let’s try something together, mijo. Just close your eyes. We’ll write a song together. Tell me what comes to mind when you think of Pichi. Tell me. Tell me why you love him.
Son: He makes me feel like it’s my birthday every day. He saved a ladybug at recess. He never laughs when the other boys make fun of me. He stops the other boys from spitting on me. I guess he makes my heart hum.
Miller: What did it mean to you to make the movie?
Martínez: Well, it’s making me tear up right now. I think in some ways we are writing stories that never happened in our lives. But we’re also, in some ways, we are healing. We are producing stories that touch back on some pain, but now reintroduce new possibilities, new horizons.
Miller: Can I stop you there? I noticed this before in the back of my head, but now it’s sort of crystallized for me because over and over you’re saying we, we, we, not I. And I’m fascinated by that.
Martínez: Yeah. It’s very important for me to say that none of this would have been done without the collaboration of people who are experts in their field, they really are. So Maya Gonzalez, a San Francisco based artist educator, written about 30 children’s books. She was my mentor in the process of collaborating with me on the children’s book. Adelina Anthony is a filmmaker director, and her partner, a producer, they have their own production company in LA. They partnered with me. They saw the value in the stories that I wanted to tell, and so this is a community effort, to produce this work.
Miller: Can you tell us about what you hope to do, the projects you want to pursue now, partly with the help of this fellowship?
Martínez: It’s amazing, this fellowship in Oregon is so unique. It’s two years, it’s $75,000 every year. That amount of money for an indie filmmaker, it takes a lot of money to produce a film. But that amount of money in a short amount of time is exact – we’ve literally been like applying for grants for $5000, $10,000, and things just take a long time. So for example, we started imagining the project for the feature film in 2020, and it’s now, we’re barely finishing it right now. It just takes a long time.
So the Fields Fellowship now allows us to have enough money to just hunker down and do this pilot. But it also, like GLSEN just put our book on their Rainbow Book Library List and now it gives me the opportunity to visit schools in Oregon so that I can make myself available at no cost to them, to be present, to share how to talk about the short film or how to talk about the children’s book.
Miller: You are, as I mentioned, the chair of the Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies Department at the university. You are Latinx, you’re queer. If there were a Venn diagram of targets of the current administration, you’d be pretty much in the center of it. Has the administration’s rhetoric, funding cuts, their actions, has that led you to stop doing anything that you otherwise would do?
Martínez: The answer is “no” in a very strong way because we’re not a discipline that can hide behind anything, like this is in our name, it’s in how we teach. But the reality is that we’ve been under duress in other contexts previously as well. For example, I believe it was in 2018 or 2019, we were doxxed, so some anonymous person posted the pictures of every faculty member’s front door and their address and said a number of outrageous things and was encouraging people to come visit us.
So I say that not to downplay what’s happening now because things have ratcheted up, but I feel like what we’re seeing here is an opportunity, like we see it, ethnic studies, seizes an opportunity to really tap into the networks and community and the respect and the solidarity that we’ve built, which matter to us from one crisis through the next.
I’m not apologizing for this political moment. I’m just saying, we can’t change the work that we do on a whim of an administration. We can be better at describing what we do, find new language to do it. We’re in the practice of building community, and so that means that sometimes we’re building community with people who don’t understand us at first glance, and that’s the work we do as educators.
Miller: Ernesto Javier Martínez, thank you very much for coming in. Congratulations on the fellowship.
Martínez: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Miller: That’s Ernesto Javier Martínez. He is a University of Oregon professor turned filmmaker and children’s book author. He recently won a prestigious Fields Artist Fellowship.
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