Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
I wanted a place where stories came alive.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and you just heard the voice of Marimar Patrón Vasquez. Marimar and her husband, Kurt Wootton, founded the Habla Center for Language and Culture in Mérida, Mexico, in 2009. I first heard about Habla when I was teaching at High Tech High Chula Vista. Every August some teachers would fly down for the Habla Teacher Institute and the way they described it didn’t sound like a week of professional development. It sounded, well, it sounded like this.

Britt Shirk:
I think of so many things when I think of Habla, but instantaneously what comes to mind are colors and just vibrance and beauty. Because it was just a magical time. It was being able to be with colleagues and traveling. And it was hot and it was humid, we were doing this work that was so meaningful, and sweating, but creating together and just really being vulnerable. I think it definitely took me to another level as not just an educator, but also I think just as a human.

Mark Poole:
There’s no air conditioning. You’re in the middle of Mérida and it’s hot and sweaty and everyone’s smelling after a few days. You kind of just got to let go and be like, “Okay. We are in this together.”

Nuvia Ruland:
If you’re in Mérida, you’re going to feel like you’re in a big hug the whole time, because it’s so warm there. You’re also going to hear the echo, because most of the buildings are made out of cinder block and there’s tiled floors. So I remember being barefoot on the cold tile, but still warm and the sound of Kurt and Marimar’s voice really resonating in the space. And then when everybody would start sharing out, it was like a cacophony of excitement. And we didn’t sound like adults anymore, we sounded like kids.

Tere Ceseña Bontempo:
I think of the game Twister, because we were doing a lot of human sculptures and it just kind of felt like a metaphor for how we were being asked to stretch ourselves, comfort levels and just the bounds of what we thought teaching could be or how creative and comfortable we are. Like, “Am I an artist? Well, maybe I’m not, but maybe I am now. And maybe I am at Habla.”

Mark Poole:
Going there you could just be your weird self a little bit. Most conferences are usually really rigid. But no, this one felt just fun and joyful and dancing and singing and that sort of stuff.

Nuvia Ruland:
One of the things that I remember, and I think it was the first activity, was learning how to observe and see. And by trade I’m a scientist, so I feel like I’m really good at observing. But we were observing for words and for colors and for images, and it really changed my perspective of how we could approach science and science literacy just by using a framing device and looking at the world through this one inch square.

Britt Shirk:
I remember sitting on the ground and we were looking at a very specific kind of microcosm of the building and just zeroing in on one thing. And we had to draw it and then we were creating this story. I just remember sitting on the ground and not only just engaging in that activity, but just really literally feeling everything. Feeling the heat, feeling the dirt on my feet but loving it, being next to people while they were creating, and just being in this moment of like, “Wow, we’re all doing this because we want to do this,” and just feeling really special but really profound.

Tere Ceseña Bontempo:
For me it’s funny that it happened like right at the end with the culmination of learning where we did these performances. And mine was chosen to be performed and I wrote a story about my grandpa and the casita that he built us and the casita became him. He had passed away just a few years before and I don’t think I fully processed it. I did that live in front of an audience and my husband was there. And we weren’t married yet, but he got to see me and everyone else got to see me just be super vulnerable. And at the same time, right as I broke down, the entire community ready to lift me up with their spirits like we were in it together. And it was totally unexpected. I thought, “Yeah, I can get through this. I’ve been practicing my lines,” and then suddenly it just took on a life of its own and I was like, “Wow, what a surprise experience.”

Alec Patton:
Those voices you just heard belonged to Nuvia Ruland, Britt Shirk, Mark Poole, and Tere Ceseña Bontempo. I went to Habla the same year as Tere. Like Tere, I performed a story I had written at the final performance, and in fact, I also broke down while performing. And while rehearsing. It was an intense week.

High Tech High Chula Vista teachers went to Habla in August because of our director, Lillian Hsu. Lillian knew about Habla because she got her master’s in education at Brown University. You’ll understand why that matters later on in the episode. She told me she sent teachers to Habla in order to get their classes on their feet. Literally.

Lillian Hsu:
What I always appreciated about Arts Literacy was about how you would engage a wide range of students to really embody text through movement, through really looking at the arts in different ways and thinking about how to provide access points for the wide range of learners that we have. Even at High Tech High, right? We’re not wedded to students sitting in rows. It’s much more collaborative, but for the most part kids are still sitting. And so, I think this idea of how do we break out of that, how do we recognize that there are all these other ways of engaging students that can be much more movement based and kinesthetic.

Alec Patton:
Last month I sat down with Marimar and Kurt to find out where all this came from. For Marimar, it started right in Mérida.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Growing up in Mérida I had two older brothers. I’m the youngest of three siblings. I didn’t have a room of my own until I was older, and reading for me was just escape to find my own corner where I felt like I was with me. But the one story that I always talk about is about Little Women. I remember, of course, Josephine was my main character, and the reason why I like her is because, as many girls my age reading that book, it was about writing and it was about independence and it was having a voice. So I really fell in love with Josephine. And I don’t remember if it was in the second book or in the third book when she becomes a teacher. So she’s writing and then she opens a school. And now, it’s that I’m making the connection about having a space and having a school.

So anyway, I went on and I studied literature.

Alec Patton:
I want to stop you, because I want to go way back. I want to go more in depth here and not less.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Okay.

Alec Patton:
Is there a first story you remember hearing?

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Oh yes, of course. The first stories I remember hearing are the ones from my grandmother from my mother’s side. She had this very rebellious spirit. So the way that she would deal with that is just by telling stories. So when we were little, my grandmother, she would bring stories about legends to us. She would always cover herself with like a comforter, like a sábana, and she will go and just tell stories about animas, or souls as we could call them in Spanish, and she would just chase us around the house and-

Alec Patton:
Wait, so she wrapped herself in a blanket?

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
In a blanket, yes. In a blanket. She would do that and chase my two brothers and myself. Just telling stories. She wasn’t chasing us to scare us, she was chasing us when she was telling the stories.

Alec Patton:
Wait, she’d tell you stories while she was chasing you around the house?

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Yes. Yes. Yes, yes. Outside in the garden, and she would tell legends and say, “Hey, here’s [word unclear] calling you. Where you are?” And then she would laugh. It was never scary, because she would laugh while she was telling the stories.

The other thing about my grandmother is she was a delicious cook and she would sit with us to eat but she never ate with us. I mean, she had the food, because she would just talk and talk and talk all the way till we finished, and then she will start eating. She had stories at every moment with us, when we were going to bed. She was an amazing storyteller.

Alec Patton:
Is there a particular story that stands out for you?

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Oh yes. She will tell stories about my grandfather, and she would tell how my grandfather used to go and steel cows. They lived in rural Puebla, next to Mexico City. So she was there and my granddad would just go and find cows and just carry them on his shoulders and just take them somewhere else. And of course, now that I think about it, this is impossible for somebody to carry a cow. But she would just tell stories, making people bigger than life. That was one of them.

The other one is the stories about her father, which I found out later in life that he was trafficking alcohol. I don’t know if you want to edit that. But she would tell stories about he would just leave and then come back with a carreta full of money and then he would put the money inside the mattress of the bed. And how she would just sometimes hide in the carreta and go with him and then getting some money for her. And she was saving the money and then one day the money that she also had in her cushion disappeared because she thinks her dad found out.

So she has a lot of stories but the beautiful– I mean, I think the point about her stories, Alec, is the fact that it was a combination of real stories with her imagination, which made them so powerful to me. So it was not only about legends, but it was about her own life and how she saw it and how she chose to tell it to us. Because when I was older and then talking to my mother, I found out about her life; all the obstacles and all the pain and the suffering that she had. But that was, for me, the magic. I mean, she will say that she would sneak out of the house and walk so fast that she was flying to get to the baile del pueblo and dance all night. And then she will get back home and she will be making no sounds. That she would just be the most admired dancer in the danza del pueblo.

So it was a lot of combination, how she told stories that I think was very appealing to me. So that is what I remember about my grandmother.

Alec Patton:
I’m also noticing every one of the stories you mentioned involved breaking the law, or at least breaking a rule.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
I know. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, I actually never thought about it, but I guess you’re right. And in that sense I do relate a lot with my Grandmother Trini. Now that you’re making me think, now I see a relationship between my grandmother, Jo from Little Women, and myself. I mean, that’s the kind of women, I guess, that I hold dear to my heart.

Alec Patton:
So tell me more about the connection you’re seeing between your grandmother and yourself now. What are the rules that you guys are breaking?

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Well, I mean, she was breaking rules, of course, but it has to be about rules about society. About the role of the female in a family and the daughter. My grandmother didn’t want to get married and why she got married is because she saw a way out of her family by getting married. So what I see is that I grew up… My parents were pretty open, but they were still from a family in the Yucatán, and Mérida is one of the more conservative cities.

But I was the only girl and when I was growing up my two brothers, they were allowed to go to a non-Catholic high school for boys and girls, and I went to an all-girl Catholic school. So it was not that I couldn’t do a lot of things, but there was always this difference between my two brothers and myself.

And there were opportunities that were given to my brothers fairly easy, but then when it was my turn to go abroad during high school, I was not going to be able to do it. So I finally did it, but it cost me more convincing and more doing. Also, going away for college, at the time people, especially girls, didn’t leave their families to go to college. So that was another obstacle that I needed to work on. But they finally did it. I did my undergrad not in Mérida but in Puebla. I went to a different state to do that. And then for grad school I went to the United States.

Alec Patton:
Got it. And that was to Brown, right?

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
I went to Brown, yes. I was doing a PhD in literature and Hispanic studies. I was doing Latin American Spanish Literature. And somehow I felt that for me… I love reading. I love writing about stories. But I did love more writing of the stories, telling stories.

Alec Patton:
You’re feeling like something’s missing from it.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
No one’s wrapping themselves in a blanket and chasing you?

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
No. Exactly! You get it, right? Nobody’s doing that. Because I was pretty much in a library doing work by myself, and every seminar I took it’s like people don’t read. And why people don’t read and people are not reading Don Quixote de la Mancha, they’re not reading 100 Years of Solitude. And for me it was like, “Well people are not reading it because you’re asking the wrong questions. And we are putting these books in a very high stand or a high shelf so people cannot reach them.”

So it was that idea, that it was disconnected storytelling from community, or literature from storytelling. And I always believed a story had a connection with everything. I mean, I love 100 Years of Solitude because it reminded me a lot of my granddad and it reminded me of the stories of my grandmother. And that’s when I found out about The ArtsLiteracy Project, which was a project that had to do with education and that had to do with literature and it had to do with theater.

So one day I was invited to a party. It was hosted at the director’s house. And I was not going to go because I had so much to do. At that moment my roommate was going out with a performance artist, Luca, who is her husband right now. They were going to the party and they said, “Marimar, just stop writing. Let’s go and meet new people.” And that’s what I ended up doing. So I arrived to the party and that’s when I met Kurt and at that moment he fell in love with me.

Kurt Wootton:
At that moment he fell in love with me. You notice that? She didn’t say, “At that moment I fell in love with him.”

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
No. Of course. But there you go.

Alec Patton:
So I want to ask you the same question, Kurt, which is, looking back on your life, where did this start for you?

Kurt Wootton:
My parents were both teachers and my grandparents were both teachers and my aunts and uncles were teachers. I never thought I’d be a teacher. I always thought I wanted to be something else. Anything but a teacher.

Alec Patton:
And where was this?

Kurt Wootton:
This was in Evansville, Indiana. The southern tip of Indiana near Kentucky. When I was very young, my mom got colon cancer. I was two years old and she died within nine months. And I didn’t know this would have such an impact on me, but years later, when I turned 16, my father brought into the room for me a letter she’d written me, really nine months of letters she’d written me while she was dying. Because she wanted me to know her. She wanted me to know who she was. And it was through those letters that I learned and met my mother. I learned who my mother was. Because all I had was very dim memories of her. And it was through her words. Her words were the way that I really got to know her, and kind of without knowing it I realized the power of words and the power that words can have on our lives.

Alec Patton:
Why did your dad wait until you were 16 to share those letters?

Kurt Wootton:
They were brutally honest. She was so honest in how she talked about her life, how she talked about what it’s like to die of cancer, what her relationship with my father was, what her honest feelings were about other people in our family. And I think that it was the right time for me to read it. Any younger and it would’ve been very difficult for me to understand some of those things she wrote about.

Alec Patton:
Difficult at 16 too, I would guess.

Kurt Wootton:
It was, but I was definitely ready for it at that point. I think he did give it to me at the perfect time. And when I went to college I studied English literature, just like Marimar. Not English literature, she studied, I think, Hispanic literature. I studied what was taught at the time, was European and American literature. And I became a teacher. Went off to teach in a boarding school.

And a really remarkable thing happened to me, just like Marimar talked about, getting that gift of Little Women. I had never taken an education course. Because like I said, I didn’t want to be a teacher. And my father gave me three books and he said, “Well, you need to read these books before you go teach.” The three books were Horace’s School by Ted Sizer, The Unschooled Mind by Howard Gardner, and The Shopping Mall High School. And read them and they all had an influence on me, but Horace’s School had a really big influence upon me. And since I taught in a private school, I could teach any way I wanted to.

So I used exhibitions in my classroom of learning where students show what they know at the end of the semester. I’d been involved in theater in high school and middle school and college, so I had my students perform. And we created art installations, art exhibits, performances, and a lot of the ideas in that book, interdisciplinary learning, the student is worker, teacher is coach, less is more; influenced me at a very early age in the way that I taught.

And then I went to a Coalition of Essential Schools conference, which was the big progressive education conference at the time, and met Ted Sizer. And he said, “Well, you must come to Brown.” He was head of the education department there at the time, so I went to Brown for my graduate degree in education and studied with Ted and took a class with him and we visited schools all up and down New England together with a group of 10 students. Spent a whole day shadowing a kid. And ended up staying at Brown with Eileen Landay, who founded The ArtsLiteracy Project. She founded it and then a couple of months later I was directing it while… she was my professor at Brown and she was still running the English program there. And I became director of The ArtsLiteracy Project when I was about 27 years, or 28 years old. Somewhere in there. And stayed there and about 10 years later I met Marimar at that party.

So that was the road to get to Brown and to get to progressive education, as we call it now.

Alec Patton:
There’s a point that happens. Maybe I just missed it or maybe you just skipped over it. But you go from, “There’s no possible way I will teach. I’ll do anything but teach,” to, “I’m going for my first job at the boarding school.”

Kurt Wootton:
Yeah, I just didn’t know what else to do. I started this theater company in my college and I was completely working on that my senior year. It was called All Student Theater and it was this massive theater company, that’s still going to this day. And it was all run by students. I was just all in on that my senior year. By the time the production that I was directing, Richard The Third, was over, I had no idea what to do, so I just sent a bunch of letters out to boarding schools. I remember loving Dead Poets Society. I love that idea of that charismatic teacher, the dramatic and the Shakespeare in the room. So I sent my resume out to a bunch of boarding schools and figure I would maybe run the theater department or teach English and figure things out from there.

And it was really finding Ted Sizer’s work, finding the Coalition of Essential Schools, finding that like minded group of progressive educators in the United States, being influenced by people like Debbie Meier and then later Dennis Littky and the kind of really interesting schools they were building and creating, and seeing the magic that could happen in the classroom with kids, that really kept me in education I’d say.

Alec Patton:
So why didn’t you move to New York and try to be a director?

Kurt Wootton:
I loved doing theater with students. I still do. But I never thought about a professional career in theater. It was never something I really wanted to do. I used it in the classroom all the time, which was the part of the root of The ArtsLiteracy Project at Brown; how can we bring performance and theater, integrate it into the daily life of classrooms? But I never wanted to be a professional director. That was never a path that I even thought about.

Alec Patton:
Why not?

Kurt Wootton:
Because I wasn’t that good.

Alec Patton:
But that’s still… You may well be right about your abilities as a director, but I would say that most people it takes a few years out in the world to decide, “You know what? I want to do something other than this.”

Kurt Wootton:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
So I’m just struck that despite the fact that you’d founded this major theater company, you had it so clear in your head. That seems like a little bit of a paradox to me, that you created this thing and you had it so clear in your head.

Kurt Wootton:
That’s funny. I can resolve your paradox for you. Think of it as not forming a theater company. Think of it as building an organization, which is what I’ve always done. So I built this organization and created a structure for it to continue into the future. It was written into the constitution at the university, which is why it’s still there. It still has a budget. And then went on to start The ArtsLiteracy Project at Brown and then Habla with Marimar. So every stage of my life, we’ve created something from nothing. And even in the classroom I feel like, when you’re with a group of kids you’re building something together, and that’s the difference between delivering information and creating something. We’re all in the classroom, we’re going to build something together. What are we going to build?

So I’ve always directed and I’ve always done it professionally. And teacher institutes, or professional development for teachers or groups of people, really is directing.

Alec Patton:
So you’re at Brown. Was it after you got there that you found out that this ArtsLiteracy Project was starting?

Kurt Wootton:
No. I was a student there. I used theater in my classroom and my professor, Eileen Landay, and I talked about it often. I left for about three months and we got a grant from the Providence Journal to start an organization, and she had the idea of The ArtsLiteracy Project and called me up because she needed somebody to run it. So immediately, right after I graduated, I came back to run the Brown Summer High School, this lab school in the summer, and then all the work that we did outside of that. Really what we were trying to do is look for ways to integrate the arts into reading and writing and literacy experiences. And we were working in the public schools around Rhode Island, Central Falls and Providence.

Alec Patton:
What was the Summer Lab High School?

Kurt Wootton:
It’s a high school for the teaching program at Brown. So if you go there, if you’re an undergraduate or a graduate student in the teaching program, you teach in that summer high school and you’re mentored and you teach collaboratively with a group of students in order to learn how to be a teacher. It’s free for high school area students to come there for free and to take classes. There are about 300 students there.

What we did is we added on The ArtsLiteracy Project to it. So we brought professional artists from the community and they partnered with practicing teachers. Because we really wanted to explore this idea of what are ways that we can bring the arts together with literacy and integrate the arts into literacy experiences.

Alec Patton:
In my head it all kind of begins with The ArtsLiteracy Project. You can trace from ArtsLiteracy Project to Habla. Is that fair to say?

Kurt Wootton:
Yeah. I mean, that’s definitely a big part of it. Yeah.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Yeah, I think so.

Alec Patton:
And so, what was The ArtsLiteracy Project? Or what is.

Kurt Wootton:
The ArtsLiteracy Project, again, it was how can we integrate the arts into literacy and language experiences. Now, we started off with literacy, and Eileen Landay will always tell this story. She said she’d sit in the back of the classrooms and see so many kids that are bored. Her job was teaching teachers. And she thought, “Isn’t there a better way to get students more engaged in the reading process? What if we brought professional theater actors in and have them partner with teachers? What would happen?” Because theater folks get text up on the stage and they bring it to life. So how can we bring text to life in our classrooms? And that was the sort of impetus behind the project.

We partnered with two theaters in town, The Providence Black Repertory Company and the Trinity Repertory Company. And their artists taught with our teachers, both at Brown Summer High School and then in the public schools during the school year. And it was really a laboratory trying to figure out what can we learn. And then later on, a few years later, we wrote a book about it and ended up working with a colleague in Brazil, Daniel Suarez, and he had a school down there and we ended up sort of setting up an ArtsLiteracy lab school there in his school. And his school was specifically focused on teaching language through the arts.

So we set up in Brazil and this cross border, cross cultural, cross language work became really interesting to me and to us, and it was in that context that I met Marimar. I was actually planning on moving to Brazil and working with Daniel at his school. And Marimar and I dreamed up Habla in that moment and said, “What if we built Habla in Mérida? Marimar was teaching Spanish at Brown, and what if we had it be a Spanish school and an international education center, a community center? And that’s when we dreamed it up together, was in Providence.

Alec Patton:
Not at that party though.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
No.

Kurt Wootton:
Not at that party, no. It took us another couple of weeks.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
I’ve got to say, it was a few more weeks.

Kurt Wootton:
No, we planned over the year. We sort of dreamed about it over the year and then moved to Mérida about a year and a half later and started looking for a building at that point.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
And that’s the beauty about stories and about when you share stories, right? They become alive. And even though I know this story, I know Kurt’s story, listening to it is always about making connection and what has happened since that makes you look back.

So the reason why I’m saying is because I think we met in a moment where we were looking for something else. I mean, Kurt was definitely in education, but he was getting more into Portuguese language and Latin American and in that sense in Spanish. And I was in a moment when I knew I didn’t want to be an academic. And I have great respect for academics and for the work they do, but I didn’t want to be an academic.

The best moment in my graduate program was the moments when I was teaching. And also was the gatherings of… I put together a poetry reading at Brown. Because we felt, or I felt, the need. That a lot of us were writers or a lot of us wanted to share things that we read out loud in a gathering, so we started an event that connected people from education but also people from the comparative lit program and from the Brazilian and Portuguese studies and from the English department. And then you’ll see engineers coming to that gathering to share stories, to read aloud, and to share the work, our original work, in a very safe space. I mean, not only about criticism and not only about saying this is good or bad, but it was about just sharing what we had inside of our heads and our words.

So I guess when we met at the story, we both were ready for something else. Or we both were ready to maybe take our interests in a way that connected more to what we wanted to do, to a future plan.

So I went to the party. Yes, I went with my roommate Julia. She was in the same department doing the graduate program, and now she’s teaching Spanish. So we get to the party, I get there with Julia and with Luca, and I think the three of us didn’t know anybody. And the energy of that place, of the people that were there, was so different from all the parties that I’d been to at Brown. It felt very… The music. I mean, it was not like I was entering a place and I was just listening to music that didn’t connect to me. They were forro and Brazilian music, and it was a very diverse group of people. What I mean diverse, I mean it was not only graduate students from Brown, but it was people who were doing very interesting work; theater people, teaching artists.

So I get there. I’m thinking that the director of the project is this… I don’t know what I thought. I thought more like of a professor of mine, maybe like an older professor. And then I met Kurt. And I don’t know, in the first minutes he asked me to dance and he asked me to dance forro. So that was, I think, the moment when we were able to start talking and getting to know each other. And him and the people that were there, we share music, we’re talking about Brazilian music and Maria Rita and projects that we wanted to do, and I think that’s when everything started. Right, Kurt?

Kurt Wootton:
Yeah. A funny part of the story, though, is that I asked her out to dinner and she said yes.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
I was going to say that.

Kurt Wootton:
And I said, “Well, I got to go to Brazil for a few weeks, so when I get back, can we go out to dinner?” So I was leaving for Brazil in another day or so.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Yeah. He asked me to say, “Hey, do you want to go out for dinner?” And I said, “Well, yes.” And then he’s like, “Well, I’m leaving for five weeks to Brazil, like in two days.”

Kurt Wootton:
I don’t think it was five weeks. We still argue about how long that was. I think it was like two weeks.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
I think it was five, but hey.

Alec Patton:
So an undisclosed period of time passes in which Kurt is in Brazil. He comes back, you guys go out to dinner-

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
And dancing.

Alec Patton:
… and dancing.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
And dancing. Merengue.

Kurt Wootton:
Yeah, we went to a Dominican club.

Alec Patton:
Wow, this is like… We’ve already had two completely different dance styles from different countries. This is intense.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Exactly. Yes.

Kurt Wootton:
Yeah. Well, merengue is easy. It’s the easiest one.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
He played it safe.

Alec Patton:
So we’ve had all these different pieces here. There’s the poetry reading that you set up, there was the lab school and the bringing theater people into schools. There’s all these pieces. There’s the setting up the school in Brazil, there’s the working with emergent bilingual students. I can see all the pieces of what’s going to become Habla have sort of appeared at different points.

Who said, “Hey, we could do this. We could do this in Mérida”?

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
I mean, I never thought of coming back to Mérida once I left. I thought that I was never going to go back. And that’s one of the questions that I get asked a lot. It’s like, “Well, you went to the United States and you studied there. How come you came back?” And it’s been a question that I encounter again and again and again and again, because you’re talking about Mexican, somebody goes to do something in the United States, people usually stay.

So it was that sense of… Kurt, he wanted to go to Brazil. He was about to move there for a year. And I was about to finish my program and just kind of knowing that what I needed to do is apply for a job in academia, but really searching for other things to do. And I think at that moment it made sense to come to Mérida. Kurt wanted to have an experience outside the United States. Mérida seems a place where we could open something, and my family was here and of course we were about to get married and maybe thinking about a family. So it sort of makes sense to be here, close to my family to help with everything, to be close to the grandparents. And also, I was kind of done with being where I was in the United States and I was missing things that I didn’t quite understand when I was living in Mexico. I was missing more of that family and the parties and the music.

And of course you have Kurt that had all the educational background, and I wanted a place where the stories came alive. I mean, that was for me one of the biggest things that I was crazing. And it’s also, I think, one of the reasons for the name that we chose. It was that idea of stories coming to life. And finding or understanding for me is a key, it’s an essential part of who we are as a community and as human beings.

Alec Patton:
So how did you guys find that incredible space?

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Kurt has always had that visual idea in terms of space. I was looking for me for something that will have spaces where people could gather. So we were in a rush. We wanted to do things right. We had a year to think about things and talk. And we were in Mérida and we were looking for spaces. I don’t even remember how many houses we went to see, and every house we saw, it was either too small or too close to something, or didn’t have a garden. It was all these different things that we were looking to find a place.

And I don’t know, maybe a few months into the search I was looking into a newspaper and I see a picture of a house that I knew that it was close to the house where I grew up. And I remember looking at the house and telling my mother and saying, “Hey Mama, this is Marissa’s house. They’re selling it.” So my mother says, “Okay, I’m going to go and I’m going to call her.” And she calls Marissa and Marissa said that the house, it was a few days in the market, and it was already promised to somebody and they already signed the promise of sale.

So I didn’t say anything to Kurt, but in the back of my head I was like, “That was the perfect house. It had a big garden and this beautiful house from the ’50s, and in a great location in Mérida.” So I didn’t say anything. And I think it was about another maybe five months that passed, or six months, and Kurt and I were in a wedding, we were not in Mérida, and I get a phone call from my mother. My mother says, “You know what? The promise didn’t go through, so Tia Marissa called me and said that if you want the house…” This was a Saturday and we were leaving to the United States on the Monday after. Right, Kurt?

Kurt Wootton:
And we were in Mahahual. We were south of Tulum. We were in a tropical storm.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
We were celebrating a friend’s wedding and there was tropical storm. So I get the phone call and she says, “Well, Marissa says that you can come see it and if you want it she’ll give it to you and it will be everything more direct.” So I’m with Kurt and I said, “This is happening. I think you’re going to love the house.” And I knew. It just felt like it was the per fect house.

So we were there. We went to the wedding. We came back to Mérida on Sunday and we went to see the house. And when Kurt saw the house it was like, “This is…” a week or two weeks after that and we signed the papers and that was it. It was what it was meant to be, that house.

Alec Patton:
That’s awesome.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
I know.

Alec Patton:
So you guys now run the Habla Center for Language and Culture. Talk me through everything that Habla does.

Kurt Wootton:
My God. I mean, we had a vision before. So working with the ArtsLiteracy Project at Brown, Brown doesn’t give money to you to do something like this. You do have to raise money, and I spent a good deal of time writing grants and trying to keep our budget going every year. And I knew we didn’t want to do that. So we knew we wanted to build certain different aspects of Habla that could all operate independently, which is one of the reasons why it does so many things, and it consists of several different areas.

One of them is the actual language school, which is two pieces. One is a local language school for kids and adults who want to come and learn a language through the arts. We also have a Spanish Immersion School, which really came out of Marimar’s teaching Spanish so well at Brown to students, which is where people fly in from all around the world to do our Spanish Immersion Program. Sometimes, they stay here for a week. And sometimes, they stay here for months. Luckily, we started doing that online three years before the pandemic. So we were already teaching online for three years when this all started. So during the pandemic, we’ve taught everything online. We moved it all online. So that’s one aspect of it.

Another is the teacher training in Teacher Institutes. So we have our own Teacher Institutes that we host at Habla, which as you know, Alec, you’ve been there. But we also have Teacher Institutes; one in Chicago. We’re partnering with High Tech High on a Teacher Institute this summer with deeper learning, and we offer these kinds of collaborative Teacher Institutes in New Orleans, really all over the United States, and even all over the world. And so there’s the teacher training part of it.

Another part of it is the Study Abroad Programs. Universities or even high schools partner with us where they bring students for a week, sometimes where students come for a semester or a year to study with us at Habla. And that’s often a partnership between us and a university where combination of our teachers and their teachers teaching together in various configurations and doing work in the communities or working with our artistic community partners. And I would say the last thing I can think of right now are our After-school Programs, which are community programs. And those consist of things like BrainSmartArts, which is arts classes for local kids, Makerspaces for kids. And even recently, we were doing a Speakeasy, which was an open-mic night once a month free for the community. I think that covers it, Marimar. Did I leave anything out?

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
No, I think you got it. I mean, the way that it helps me think about it is a place. I mean, I don’t want to say like a think tank, but it’s a place where great colleagues and great people come and think about projects that had to do with education, language, arts, and culture. And crossroads for that for me, it’s very important. But it’s always that has to do with language, education, arts, and culture. But a lot of things have come to Habla. A lot of people just creating together and coming together to offer experiences, and for me, that’s also what it’s about Habla. A space where everybody together creates an experience that has to do with those four things. That’s what it helps me to think about Habla because now-

Kurt Wootton:
That’s a nice-

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
The Speakeasy came out of two of our teachers that were part of Habla. So I think that gave us the structure that we put or how it was… It was not a school. It was not this–It gave us flexibility. But for me, those are the four pillars of Habla.

Alec Patton:
That’s really helpful. Which programs keep the lights on for you guys?

Kurt Wootton:
I would say it’s a combination of all of them. But perhaps, most strongly, it’s people coming to Habla from different countries to learn Spanish because that’s going on all year long, every week of the year. Study Abroad Programs and partnerships with university that are ongoing that happen every year are a big, big strength of Habla’s.

I would say those are the two biggest things because they happen all year long, but there’s also this spiritual energy we get from stuff too. I mean, like from the Speakeasy, which was one of my favorite things that teachers put together. Some teachers at Habla, Ian Wiggins, and Sofia, and some others, decided that they wanted to do a Speakeasy, this open-mic night every… And it became an extraordinary space for people in the community gathering to share their stories, and poetry, and their artwork, and performances. And it happened very organically. And the Teacher Institute is one of my favorite things, which is a week every year where teachers from all around the world gather together to go through an experience together, and to meet each other, and to share ideas. And just seeing the mix of languages and the community of people that come together for that every year, it’s really exciting for me.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Yeah, I love that. I got to say. When you get so many different people, you get from kids that come to Habla for our Creative Space Summer Camp, you have adults and retirees learning Spanish and then you have the study abroad college students and then you have these [inaudible] that happens around the same time. And all those energies that happen at Habla, it’s just what really makes the spirit and the heart of Habla.

Kurt Wootton:
And that’s what my Marimar says. She always says, “I love it when the building’s humming with action and people.” And you’ll get those local kids in the same room with some teachers from Spain, and you get this mix of people. It’s so exciting at Habla to see.

Alec Patton:
If I went into a language immersion program, would it look like Habla to me? How consistent is it across the thing, and how much is it like, “Well this is this thing and this is…” Do you see what I mean?

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Yeah. I mean, I’ll now say I think it’s very consistent, and I think there’s a philosophy, there’s a methodology, there’s certain key elements that we put in each program, but it’s also a lot of the beautiful and the amazing people that work with us that bring their own passions to the programs.

So I think definitely. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think definitely in the programs that we do you’ll be able to see it. Now more than ever.

Kurt Wootton:
Yeah. I would say seven years after we started Habla I would say the culture of Habla took hold. And what I mean by that, we sat down with our teachers about that time and we used to both go into teachers’ classrooms and observe them and give them feedback. We’ve got a lot of young teachers, so we’d have to grow them. And the methodology was so strange to a lot of them, exhibitions at the end of the semester and things like this.

So we did that a lot at first, but then about seven years in we had a professional development session and we said, “What are the words that you would use to describe Habla?” And the words that they came up with, even with a lot of new people in the room, were so consistent and so beautiful and so much representative of what we did that it was around that time that we felt like the culture of Habla has really taken hold. And we started to get new teachers, and because we’d had so many experienced teachers there for so many years, and because there was this shared sense of what Habla was, we started to get this shared culture in all of our programming.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
And I agree, because every teacher that has been there is in some way still connected to Habla; with projects or conversations. So now I believe that is very transferrable, and one thing that I saw is, now that we went online, I wasn’t thinking about even doing immersion online. We continued in group classes. And maybe around September we started thinking of putting the immersion program. And I see now the immersion program online, and it just has the same feeling. You’re not in Mérida, of course. We’re not serving food. But the way that the class and the themes and the way that it’s structured and how we’re building community and how we’re telling stories and how we’re sharing stories and ending with a final event at the end of the week, I could see that that was also happening. Not necessarily because I was there doing the program, but it was for the teachers that put it together.

And also with the teacher institute, when we put it online, for me that was a moment when I saw that, yeah, you could see Habla at that moment.

Kurt Wootton:
I think it’s a real generosity. That’s what I would say. It’s a generosity between teachers and between teachers and students and students and teachers. People are very generous with each other at Habla. They give of themselves to each other, and that’s a really beautiful thing to see. When a new teacher comes in and they don’t understand this idea of an exhibition or planning backwards, other teachers will step up and just really work with them on their curriculums. And it’s a beautiful thing to see.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
That’s awesome. Thank you guys so much.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Oh, thank you. It’s always a pleasure.

Kurt Wootton:
Thank you! This is really wonderful, Alec. I’m so glad that you had us.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
I know.

Kurt Wootton:
We don’t get to do this with each other very often, so it’s amazing to hear from each other what Habla is.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
I know.

Kurt Wootton:
But it’s such a pleasure to talk with you, especially High Tech High we value so highly. It was one of the first schools I’ve ever seen where… I went to a lot of those progressive schools in the coalition days, in those sort of ’70s and ’80s let’s say, and they all did a lot of hands on learning but they all missed the aesthetic part of it, the art part of it. And I was so impressed at High Tech High that they not only have the hands on part and they were wrestling with intellectual frameworks which I love, but also everything was so beautiful. The students really cared about creating great work and they took pride in their work and their school, and that was a beautiful thing to see.

And so, so happy to be working in this way with High Tech High on all these different things we’re working on.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Yeah. I agree.

Alec Patton:
Awesome. Thank you guys so much.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Perfect. Thank you so much, Alec.

Kurt Wootton:
Thanks Alec. Talk to you soon.

Alec Patton:
Thanks guys.

Marimar Patrón Vasquez:
Take care.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and produces by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Hershel. This summer, for the first time ever, Habla and High Tech High Graduate School of Education are running a four day workshop together. It’s called Found Beautiful. It runs from June 15th to June 18th. It’s all online, and you can register at hthgsc.edu/events/found-beautiful. There’s a link in the show notes. Thanks for listening.