Ventura García Calderón en el banquillo de los acusados

Regarding the goal of increasing participation, I found a couple of factors that may motivate Latinos/as to get involved in the production of locative storytelling.

One possible way to increase participation among Latinos/as with the production of locative storytelling is to portray the activity as an opportunity to invest in cultural and family heritage, and memory. Several participants who were able to geotag their stories mentioned that they felt accomplished for having done something that their children be proud of in the future when they become adults.

In fact, legacy was a motivation factor for some of them to finish their stories.

An interesting example of genuine motivation is the case of José who wrote the story on his own iPad at his work while taking breaks, which reveals his high level of commitment to accomplish the task. José said that the accomplishment of the task was important for him because he wanted to have something to show his children when they grow up. In addition, participants acknowledged that in the beginning they did not see a value in the concept of writing stories about places. José, for instance, admitted that he was confused when the concept was introduced in the context of a computing class. In fact, he asked himself: “historia para que?” (“story for what?”).

However, over time, the participants developed their own values and concepts about the project. Several other participants mentioned in the interview that was important to leave something as a legacy for their children.

José understood the value of recording family history attached to places, and since he started the training, he has been taking a picture of one of his little sons hugging a tree. His project is to document over time the growth of his little son

compared to the size of the tree that is also growing in his front yard. This participant understood that recording a personal history is a way to connect family to the pride of past. Also, he has been living in the US for 17 years, and he thinks he will spend his old age in this country. For this reason, he believes that it would be valuable to show his grandsons the history of their family in Texas. The notion of leaving a legacy for children or grandchildren is frequently connected to pride, and other several participants mentioned this as a value.

Unlike what past research has shown (Stephens, 2012), this current study also found that it is easier to increase participation or, at least, to attract more interest in the production of locative storytelling among Latina women than Latino men in the low-income community studied in this dissertation. This is not only because they have more spare time than their male spouses, who have long work shifts or work outside Austin, but also because they are very involved with schools, which are sources of information about the community. Another factor is that they showed themselves very willing to acquire new skills and locative technologies.

I noted that women in this community are dedicated to self improvement and manifest that through involvement with schools, which play a strong role in this community as a delivery of local information. These residents in Dove Springs community live very locally, isolated in their neighborhood, but nevertheless, do not know much about their locality. This is a very striking finding that might provide opportunities for the development of locative mobile applications for low-income and immigrant communities. This set of results led us to think that it is critical to receive institutional support from schools and non-profits to undertake locative media projects in this area of Austin.

There are still, however, many barriers to reach a constant level of high participation in the production of locative storytelling about the locality where the participants live. Jönsson and Örnebring (2010) define "high participation" as "those features where users are allowed to produce content even when not actively solicited"

(p. 132). So, in this sense, these participants still have to get familiar with smartphones’ capabilities to produce content unsolicited.

In line with previous studies about locative storytelling (Willis et al, 2012;

Løvlie, 2011), the first barrier to produce locative stories that was encountered was

the lack of local knowledge or the knowledge of local history about places in Dove Springs. Participants did not produce stories necessarily about events that happened in places in the neighborhood, but rather some of them produced lifelong memories, which may be considered personal history. Interestingly enough, some of the participants geotagged their stories to their houses where they currently live in Dove Springs or nearby.

The second barrier was access to computers. The goal of the training was to engage the participants in the production of in-depth locative stories and also to provide them with mobile skills to enable them to participate in the hybrid space.

Several participants could not finish the stories in the convenience of their houses because they did not own a computer. Access to mobile technology was not enough, because the tiny keyboard’s did not enable them to type articles, a common limitation with mobile stories, which is well-discussed in the mobile journalism literature (see Koponen & Väätäjä, 2009).

The third barrier was writing skills or literacy skills, which were also a major obstacle to mobilize the TechComunidad participants to create locative stories.

Besides dealing with learning about new technologies and devices, some participants mentioned that they also struggled with the writing, although the classes were given in Spanish, and they were allowed to write their stories in their native language. It is interesting to note that to date there are not many studies or experiments with locative media and writing. Most of the locative media projects to date are focused on audio or visuals.

Also, several participants mentioned that the locative story was their first story written in their entire lives. One of the oldest of participants said:

porque yo nunca habia escrito una historia y ahora pienso que no va a ser tan dificil de volver escribir otro tipo de historia, talvez necesito mas pratica para subir o bajar fotos y en eso necesito de ayuda.

(Because I had never written a story before, now I think that it is not going to be as difficult the next time to write another kind of story. I might need more practice in uploading and downloading photos. In that, I need help.)

The example above shows the level of difficulty that truly disadvantaged people are going to face in using locative media to create and share stories as producers. They have had little or no experience in writing or written storytelling.

They also did not know how to use the technologies, particularly those of photo uploading or simple computing skills such as "copy and paste." This indicates that a variety of kinds of teaching and mentoring are going to be required to integrate this population into the hybrid space, which favors the kind of integrated literacy, educational, and technological program that RCYF is doing, but will require also specific intervention to work with locative tools beyond its integrated basic curriculum. These barriers led us to conclude that individual mentorship is key to foster participation in the production of locative stories in the context of low-income community. In order to foster the accomplishment of the tasks, I had to build rapport and engage with participants not only as a group but also as individuals. This degree of involvement was crucial, because I had to ask the participants if I could go to their houses to help them with the writing and computer tasks. Rapport, therefore, was fundamental to develop a mentorship and encourage the participants to finish the Historypin project. Obviously, this finding is not so surprising since “rapport” has been considered essential to any kind of collaborative work (Kember, 1997). I built rapport with participants by disclosing a very personal and intimate story about the house where I was born and raised. Throughout the training, several participants mentioned that somehow they had similar stories. This sense of empathy was essential for some of the participants to accomplish the task.

On the other hand, the fact that many participants said that this was their first story written about their lives reveals how writing may be a powerful factor of motivation to those participants. As past studies in psychotherapy have showed, confronting deeply personal issues through writing “has been found to promote physical health, subjective well-being, and selective adaptive behaviors” (Pennebaker, 1997, p. 162). In this sense, our findings suggests that combining cultural legacy with creating a story of their own may be a powerful framework to incude in locative storytelling apps for Latinos/as in underserved communities.

Overall, these findings reveal two important aspects of fostering participation in the creation of locative content among Latinos/as in underserved communities.

First, there are some strong cultural aspects, such as pride for the accomplishments of their people. As previous studies have shown, “pride is a defining characteristic of Latino culture” (Leonardi, 2003, p. 163; see Gracia, 2000; Morales, 2002). Another cultural aspect of Latinos is the high value placed on familial relationships (Leonardi, 2003), and this value is why participants connected the pride of accomplishing the goal of producing content with their children. Second, social psychologists (McAdams, 1996) have found that narratives helped to shape identity, and in the case of adults in middle age and after, they start defining themselves in terms of those things, people, and ideas they generate and leave behind or in Erickson’s (1968) famous words: “I am what survives me” (McAdams, 1996). In light of this, locative stories for those participants were understood as way of extending their selves and rooting them to places where they live through location-based technology. In this sense, the training was successful in conveying knowledge about the hybrid space, but much more needs to be done to enable low-income Latino/as to produce content about themselves or the area where they live.

3.2.1.2 Place, sense of place, and locality

The spatial aspect of locative stories and also the research that was required to write the stories helped participants think about the place where they live. During the interviews but also throughout my observations in the field, several participants mentioned that they did not know much about the community and the neighborhood where they live, even though they have lived there long enough to know it well (see years of residence on the table below) and despite having means to move around the city: just two interviewed participants said they did not have a car. The participants seemed to have a sense of place, because they pursued bonding through social interactions and social events in the communities, but this sense of place does not seem to be enough to produce a strong sense of belonging to locality. However, the research about the space that is required to produce a locative storytelling piece may play a strong role in deepening meaning about place.

In this way, a great example of how some participants changed their point of view in regards to the place where they live from the beginning of the training until

the end is the case of Magdalena. She was one of the participants who was refusing to write the story. When the training was ending, a devastating flood swept through the community and caused the death of five residents. Shocked by the reality of the event, Magdalena decided to geotag the picture of her flooded lawn and share her experience of witnessing the flood. She said that, after the flooding, she understood that she lived in un barrio pobre, in “a poor neighborhood.” She associated the effects of the flooding and the lack of infrastructure of this area of Austin with the lack of digital information that we had discussed during the training. This participant mentioned in the interview that she understood why this area did not have any pictures on the Austin map in Historypin. This was a major driving force in her decision to write a story. In her words:

At first, I thought that was not interesting [production of a locative story] ... I realized there is no picture to this place [attached to the map of Austin on Historypin] ... because this community ... and I have been said that community is quite forgotten, here people are like the third ...

this ...how do you say that? There is no money, a poor neighborhood, this community is very low society, I've noticed ... and there are still many people who have not noticed, it is a poor neighborhood⁸.

By geotagging the space where she lives, Magdalena layered the physical space with her personal history and also of the community’s history, providing information and potentializing the hybrid space. Early locative media projects like Murmur offered history from the ground up, told by voices that are often overlooked when the stories of cities are told (see murmurtoronto.ca). Once told and heard, these stories can change the way people, including the author of the story, think about that place and the city at large. Magdalena also understood her own position in that place,

8 In Spanish: “Al principio yo pensé que no fuera interesante [production of a story]... Yo he me dado cuenta que no había ninguna foto para este lugar [attached to the map of Austin on HistoryPin]…porque esta comunidad… han dicho y pienso también que és una comunidad olvidada, que aquí las personas no… son como de la tercera… este… como se dice esto? Que non tiene dinero, un barrio pobre, que esta comunidad es muy baja para la alta sociedad, esto que me he dado cuenta…y todavía hay mucha gente que no se ha dado cuenta que es un barrio pobre...”

as a resident who has the identity shaped by what others say about the place where she lives with her family.

As Magdalena found, the process of producing locative stories can reveal how the lack of digital information about the neighborhood is prevalent. Another participant wanted to produce a story about a new outlet on the road where she used to live. She was surprised she could not find any sort of information online about the construction of the new outlet. She also looked on Google Maps and could not find any information about the place she wanted to write about. These findings point to the fact that low-income communities are neglected in the matter of the production of digital content. It reinforces the need to provide individual mentorship for this population to enable them to fill their own geographical space with locative stories.

Other participants were surprised that the technology allows one to learn about the history of Texas or places while on the go. One of the male participants, a 44 year-old said:

It made me think that there is stuff out there that you are missing. I used to like to go on a road trip, I am not promoting Historypin, but two years ago I went on a road trip to New York. If I had known Historypin back in the day or something, not only Historypin, but something similar to that, I could have said [while travelling] “lets check it that out.”

Most of these families are patriarchal, which means that the men play the role of provider and move around places in the city much more than the women. Most of the female participants in this study tend to spend most of the time in their neighborhood to avoid traffic or because they consider they do not have enough time to go to distant places. For this reason, it might be less likely to those users to use locative apps because they do not move much around the city. After all, locative media applications aim to leverage mobility of technology to encourage use, while people are on the go in their everyday lives (Humphreys, 2007).

Thus, those families might be potential producers of locative storytelling, because they live very locally. However, these findings also suggest that they might

not be heavy potential consumers of locative stories, certainly not as early adopters.

On the other hand, although those participants live largely isolated in their neighborhoods, some of them have a shallow sense of local knowledge. Several participants had trouble choosing the topics for their locative stories because they said they did not know much about any local places. There is a paradox here, because local knowledge would be very valuable to the women interviewed, as it already is to the men, but they do not move around enough to acquire very extensive local knowledge.

These findings suggest that the men use the mobile phone to coordinate with work and family more than the women. With the exception of one 64 year-old female participant, the other five women, when asked to describe a typical day, said that they get up very early to prepare breakfast for the family, mainly for the kids before taking them to school. The women also undertake domestic (e.g.: cleaning) tasks during the day and pick up their children at school. The two men interviewed highlighted their work as a domain where locative technogy was useful. Unlike all the women interviewed, one of the male interviewees said he started his day on his smartphone looking at his schedule.

This study also suggests that schools in this neighborhood function as a hub of local information delivery. When asked about how they search for local information about their neighborhood or Austin, several participants mentioned the relevance of the schools in Dove Springs to learn about events and information and to get involved in the community. Two participants were highly involved with the events at one elementary school. One of the women interviewed said that she sometimes even stays at the school after dropping off her kids. Another participant mentioned how she learned about the computing classes provided by RCYF through her son’s teacher.

Many but not all of the parents are involved with schools, where their kids are enrolled.

One of the most active and talkative participants of the classes, a 64 year-old female, said she feels like the school is her second home even though she does not have kids there. In her words: “…es mi casa [Houston Elementary School] porque hablo con uno, con otro…” (“It [the school] is my home because I speak with several people there.”) Another participant with four kids emphasized this idea by saying that if one does not go to school, one does not learn about what is happening in the community.

This aspect of living in the neighborhood is relevant because it reveals possible institutional arrangements to increase local knowledge and participation in

This aspect of living in the neighborhood is relevant because it reveals possible institutional arrangements to increase local knowledge and participation in