Read more about the episode here.
Ruth Behar: “Improvisation is really important in writing because you discover things as you write. If you already know everything — this is what I always say to students — if you know everything you’re going to write, then it’s not worth writing.”
(THEME MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: From Futuro Media and PRX, it’s Latino USA. I’m Maria Hinojosa. Today, one of the most influential anthropologists of our time tells us about her creative process on the page, and on the dance floor.
Ruth Behar had to learn the rules of anthropology to know she wanted to break them.
Today, Ruth is a well-known name in academic and literary circles. But before all that, Ruth was a PhD student at Princeton.
(MUSIC)
There, she was taught that anthropologists had to be impersonal, objective observers of the people and cultures that they study. And for years, Ruth was a good student — an exceptional student, in fact. Ruth was the first Latina to be awarded a MacArthur Genius Fellowship in 1988, when she was just 32 years old.
But in 1996, Ruth published a book she thought might end her career. She titled it “The Vulnerable Observer. Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart.” It’s a collection of personal and ethnographic essays, where she argues that objectivity in cultural anthropology is a myth. This approach changed the field as we know it.
Ruth Behar: “I still get emails and letters from people who have read the book and they said, thanks to you, I did this or I wrote this, or I would never have done this, I would never have talked about myself in my scholarship. So it did open a door for others who wanted to write in a different way than they had been taught to write.”
(MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: Ruth was born in Cuba to a Jewish family. Later, she was raised in Queens, New York. Her heritage has informed not only her anthropological career, but her career as a writer as well.
In recent years, Ruth has written numerous books for children and young adults, like her granddaughters. Her latest young adult novel, “Across So Many Seas,” was released in early 2024.
Producer Elisa Baena has been fascinated with the work of Ruth Behar for years. And while getting to know her, Elisa discovered they have a unique connection.
Not only are they both Cuban American writers — they’re both also salsa dancers.
Elisa Baena: “You are an anthropologist, but you are a dancing anthropologist.” (LAUGHS)
Ruth Behar: “I’m a dancing anthropologist.”
Maria Hinojosa: And as Ruth will tell you, her experiences on the dance floor translate rather poetically to the page. Today, we’re bringing you a story about a multifaceted, multi-talented scholar told by a person touched by her work, and I’m going to let Elisa Baena take it from here.
(MUSIC)
Elisa Baena: A few months ago, Ruth Behar and I made plans to go to salsa class together, but before we made it to class, she came over to my apartment to chat for a while. The first thing on our agenda was her latest book, “Across So Many Seas.”
“I spent the day on the beach reading the book.” (LAUGHS)
Ruth Behar: “You’re getting paid to do this.
Wait, what’s going on here?” (LAUGHS)
Elisa Baena: The book centers on four 12-year-old girls from the same Sephardic family spread across space and time.
Ruth Behar: “We’re going to see how they’re thinking, how they’re living, how they’re feeling. what they’re doing, what dreams they have. We don’t stop being 12-year-old girls when we’re 25 or when we’re 60-something, right?
I mean, that girl is still inside of us, and, and I tried to make it a very poetic book as well, so that it would interest a young reader, because I think young readers like poetic writing, but I think older readers do, too. So I was hoping it would be kind of an all-ages book.”
Elisa Baena: I was excited to learn about this book because I always learn something from Ruth.
I first discovered her work in 2022 when I was a fellow at Latino USA.
(MUSIC)
During my fellowship, I worked on a radio essay about the condo collapse that killed 98 people in Miami Beach a year earlier.
News Anchors: “Right to that breaking news tonight where we continue to follow the latest on this condo building collapse.”
“These videos and images out of Surfside, Florida show unbelievable destruction.”
Elisa Baena: It was a tragedy that happened blocks away from the apartment I lived in with my grandmother, where I spent a lot of my childhood. And every day that I sat down to write, felt like I was breaking my heart open again, and again.
One of my friends and colleagues knew I was struggling, so she emailed me the first chapter of “The Vulnerable Observer.”
Ruth Behar: “As a storyteller opens her heart to a story listener, recounting hurts that cut deep and raw into the gullies of the self. Do you, the observer, stay behind the lens of the camera, switch on the tape recorder, keep the pen in hand?”
Elisa Baena: At the time, I didn’t know who Ruth was or that this book caused a sea change in anthropology. I just knew that reading her words, her prose, mixed with poetry, mixed with ethnography, it gave me the momentum I needed to keep going.
Ruth Behar: “Vulnerability doesn’t mean that anything personal goes. The exposure of the self, who is also a spectator, has to take us somewhere we couldn’t otherwise get to.”
(MUSIC)
Elisa Baena: I soon learned that Ruth and I had friends in common because that’s just how Miami and the Cuban diaspora work. We were eventually connected when she was visiting family in Miami Beach. And while we were talking about writing, we somehow started talking about dance, and we realized that we’re both salsa dancers.
Ruth Behar: “Dance is this wonderful non-verbal communication. In fact, you don’t have to talk, right? You can, it’s, it’s this wonderful universal language where you, you lead the steps and you can dance with each other and you don’t have to speak the same spoken language at all.”
Elisa Baena: So now whenever Ruth is in Miami, we go to salsa class together.
Ambi Salsa Class: “One, two, three… five, six, seven… Go!…”
Elisa Baena: Dance has allowed us to cultivate a friendship that’s been so nourishing for me as a young writer. Ruth has shown me that writing is about trusting your instincts. It’s just like trying a new salsa step. Your ego has to get out of the way to let the real magic happen.
Ruth Behar: “You have to be humble when you’re writing and you don’t know how the writing is going to happen sometimes. Like, I’ll sit there and go, I don’t really know what’s going to happen next, you know, in this story. I hope I can figure it out. You’ve got to take each step as it goes.”
Elisa Baena: Ruth’s insights shaped my own approach to writing. In the case of “Across So Many Seas,” Ruth’s process was all about building a strong structure and following the beats laid out before her.
Ruth Behar: “For me, having a structure format is really helpful. In my previous book, ‘Letters from Cuba,’ it was all letters and it didn’t seem so daunting somehow, that I was writing a letter instead of a chapter, right? And with this book, it was knowing that it was going to be each girl. That each section would be about 40 or 50 pages because it couldn’t be that long if I was going to have the four stories.
So here are four girls, four places, four time periods. How is this going to work? How am I going to put this together so it’s readable, and somebody isn’t thinking, well, these are four different stories or four different short stories, but they’re not. They’re all part of the same big story, but I just decided it would start in 1492 and then it would end in the present day in these different time periods where something cataclysmic is happening in their societies.”
Elisa Baena: There’s a big gap in time between the first two protagonists in “Across So Many Seas.” The first girl, Benvenida, lives in 1492 when her family is expelled from Toledo during the Spanish Inquisition. The next character is Benvenida’s descendant, who lives in Turkey in 1923. Ruth connected both these characters through an instrument called an oud.
(MUSIC)
Ruth Behar: “Such a beautiful instrument, and the oud plays a very important role in the story because — well for a few reasons. For a personal reason because my paternal grandmother who was named Rebecca, she traveled to Cuba with an oud. She literally brought an oud with her, from Turkey to Cuba. And then we knew that she sang these old songs, the old Sephardic or Spanish songs. So we knew that. And that’s basically all we knew about her. And that she had been sent to Cuba, that she had been sent to Cuba by her parents. And then she never saw her parents again. So these were the things I knew about that grandmother and they seemed very mysterious. So she really inspired the story, kind of the mystery of what, what was going on in her life.
She also didn’t like to talk, I think as much about her story. She didn’t share as much. And when I asked my aunt about it, she goes, ‘Oh no, no, we never asked questions that would have been very disrespectful.’ The one story that we heard was that she was sent to Cuba on an arranged marriage. The legendary family story is that then she was living with an uncle, this was her one relative in Cuba. There was a hallway where she would sit and play the oud and sing Sephardic songs and that the man who became my grandfather, my grandfather Isaac, that he was walking along the street and heard her playing the oud and that was what attracted him.”
(MUSIC)
“This is the sad part of the story. She married and she had four children. My father was the third. After she married, she stopped playing the oud. She didn’t have time to play the oud. And what they all said is that the oud hung from a nail on the wall.”
(MUSIC)
“So the arranged marriage is kind of there in my book, but in a different way. In the book, it becomes a punishment. But I definitely felt very close to her in writing the book because I was thinking about her so much and trying to imagine her youth in Turkey and what it would have been like to have, you know, gone to Cuba from Turkey as a young girl. So it was just great to create a life for her in the story.”
(MUSIC)
“I wrote most of it at my desk in my home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I have an altar right next to my desk, and usually Jewish people don’t have altars, so I can’t call it exactly an altar, but it’s like an altar. It has images of all of my ancestors and relatives who have departed, so both grandparents, my great grandparents, other relatives, a friend who passed away this past year as well, I’ve got something of his there too, and candles and so on. And so when I’m writing, I’m always, like, looking at the pictures of those ancestors. So I do feel very connected to the ancestors and I don’t forget them and their spirits are very important to me and I think about them all the time, so maybe that energy somehow travels through the writing.
It’s like talking about intangible heritage, things like songs, or poems, or stories, or traditions, that are passed on. There’s, there isn’t, like, a palpable artifact, maybe, but it’s still very real. So like in this book, in “Across So Many Seas,” it’s like these songs that got passed on, it’s an intangible heritage, you know, as opposed to say, the Sephardic museum. That’s a tangible heritage, but it was a 14th-century synagogue and, you know, beneath all the plaster and all the walls that they built around it, that material remained, and that’s, that’s a tangible heritage. That’s an actual synagogue that existed all those centuries ago, but it’s now, now a museum.”
(MUSIC)
Elisa Baena: Ruth’s work as an anthropologist often focuses on connecting women across generations, cultures, and borders, especially Cuban women on and off the island. I’ve never been to Cuba myself, but Ruth’s stories make me feel like I have.
“You know, I don’t really feel like I have an ancestral home. You know, I’m not in a position where I can go and live in Cuba. I’m not in a position where I can go and live in, you know, Las Islas Canarias in Spain, where part of my family is originally from, as far as I know. But this apartment where I spent my childhood, that’s, like, the most concrete version of my ancestral home.”
Ruth Behar: “No, that makes sense. And I think, you know, the idea of what an ancestral home is can also shift over time. Like this is what you feel now, at a later stage of your life, you might feel something different.”
Elisa Baena: “Yeah. That’s what I feel at 25.”
Ruth Behar: “That’s what you feel at 25, but when you’re 65, you might feel something different. So I think keep that in mind. And I think with my book, you know, I really wanted to think about Sephardic identity and take it back to 1492, it probably goes back much before that. But it was this idea of Jewish people lived in Spain for over a thousand years. You know, it’s really incredible. It’s a long time. They were really part of the history of Spain. And sometimes people don’t know that. And that was one of the things that I wanted to address in the book, and, you know, and to go that far back. And a lot of Spaniards will tell you that they think they might have Jewish ancestry, right? It’s because the Conversos were Jewish people that converted to Catholicism and they converted in order to be able to stay. And so to me, that’s so fascinating and that people now think about how we have these connections with one another. Sephardic Jews are connected to Spaniards in some way because we share this history. So that’s been so interesting to me that there’s kind of this, we’ve sort of come full circle and this is, there’s been a kind of reconciliation.”
Elisa Baena: As it often does, our conversation turned to dance.
(MUSIC)
The first time I met Ruth felt like writing an essay in real time about the parallel experiences of writing and dancing.
Each word is a step. Each set of moves is a paragraph. The way you connect them is what gives you your style. And some conversations flow so easily, they feel like a dance. And even though we’ve danced together, I never asked Ruth why she started dancing in the first place.
Ruth Behar: “Oh, I love dancing. Well, you know, I was a child who had a broken leg for a long time and I was in a body cast for a year when I was 10, and I write about that in my first novel for young readers, ‘Lucky Broken Girl.’ So I was lucky and I was broken.
And that’s very much something that informed, I think, the person I, I became. I was a very active girl before this car accident and before the body cast. And then after the body cast and learning to walk again, I became much more afraid that I would get hurt again. I didn’t want to run. I really stopped doing a lot of physical activities. And, became more of a reader and more contemplative. And similarly in, in college and through graduate school, I just didn’t, didn’t really do a lot of exercise or dancing for that matter. And I think it was really when I was pregnant, um, at the age of 29, um, pregnant with my son, the one child I had, that was when I started to want to do exercise, I started doing aerobics and things like that to stay in shape during the pregnancy. And then after… after I had the baby, that was when, I think that was when I started taking dance classes.”
(MUSIC)
“And then I discovered Rueda de Casino, which I love, which you dance in a circle, you change partners with. I love that. And I was coming, every time I would come to Miami, I would dance in a Rueda here in Miami. And that was great. So I did that for a long time. And then for a while, for many, many years, I haven’t danced now for the last four years, but for many, many years, I danced tango. And I loved tango.”
(MUSIC)
Elisa Baena: Through dance, Ruth has witnessed the themes of her writing in her own life, as a member of the Cuban and Jewish diasporas. Her relationship with tango embodies that story.
Ruth Behar: “My maternal grandfather was actually supposed to go to Argentina instead of Cuba, but he somehow got on the wrong boat. So he ended up in Cuba and his sister was waiting for him in Argentina. So the descendants of that sister, still live in Buenos Aires. And when I’ve been to Buenos Aires, I’ve seen them. So I have these cousins. So I feel like I have a connection also to the Argentine culture and to tango. So tango and salsa are very important to me. And I mean, I think they’ve just It’s like helped me to feel comfortable in my body.”
(MUSIC)
Elisa Baena: I get what she means. Salsa also helps me build a new relationship with my body as an adult woman and not a teenager in a leotard. I grew up dancing ballet and still associated dance with structure and discipline instead of creative expression. When I started salsa dancing, though, I realized that technique is important, but dancers who get stuck there can’t experience meaningful connections with themselves or their dance partners.
Ruth Behar: “The dancers that start telling you what to do, ‘one, two, three, five, six, seven’ — those are the worst dancers. The best dancers know how to lead you gently and gracefully with, you know, with their hands, with their body movements, with their shoulders, with how they look at you. That’s the way to dance. And so you’re also kind of cultivating this other way of communicating, which is also important.
You could dance with somebody you hate, but you could potentially understand each other through dance. So if we come back to the theme of understanding and empathy, you can understand each other, through dance”
(MUSIC)
Elisa Baena: I should have known that Ruth is a dancer before we even met. Her writing touches your hand, makes eye contact, leads and follows.
I remember thinking that the first time I read her work.
(MUSIC)
Ruth Behar: “Despite all the ways I’ve interrogated anthropology, despite not always feeling proud of being an anthropologist, I am an anthropologist at heart. An anthropologist, not in the credentialed or academic sense, but in the sense that I have cared and will always care about vulnerability as a shared experience, and the way profound and unfathomable encounters can take place between strangers that will change our lives forever.”
(MUSIC)
Elisa Baena: Ruth has changed my life forever, and I can tell you that sin pena, but that’s enough talking for now. We have a salsa class to get to.
(THEME MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: This episode was produced by Elisa Baena and edited by Andrea López-Cruzado and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Stephanie Lebow.
The Latino USA team includes Victoria Estrada, Reynaldo Leaños Jr., Glorimar Márquez, Marta Martínez, Mike Sergeant, Nour Saudi, and Nancy Trujillo. Peniley Ramírez is our co-executive producer. Our senior engineer is Julia Caruso.
Our marketing manager is Luis Luna. Our theme music was composed by Xenia Rubinos. I’m your host and co-executive producer, Maria Hinojosa. Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, look for us on all of your social media and I’ll see you on Instagram — ya tu sabes. ¡No te vayas! Bye!
Stephanie Lebow: Latino USA is made possible in part by the Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide. The Huizing Simons Foundation, unlocking knowledge, opportunity, and possibilities. More at hsfoundation.org. And the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. (MUSIC)
