In the spring of 1935Tejanafolklorist Jovita González sat down in her South Texas study and wrote a short story: a fact not astonishing in itself, but unexpected nonetheless, given the resources necessary for the creation of fiction—a quiet room, time, repose—none of which were usually available to Mexican American women in Texas circa 1935. Miss González (for at that particular moment she was still a “Miss”) didn’t write about romantic love, a subject that might well have been on her mind since she was planning her wedding at the time, or even about the folk traditions...

In the summer of 1925, Jovita González discovered J. Frank Dobie, the “father” of Texas folklore studies, at the University of Texas where she briefly enrolled as a Spanish student. Before that moment of discovery, she recalled, “the legends and stories of the border were interesting, so I thought, just to me. However he made me see their importance and encouraged me to write them.”1 González found folklore studies at the very moment of its emergence as a regional scholarly practice, and she quickly rose to prominence in the field as one of its most charming and “authentic” scholarly voices....

In a biographical sketch that she sent to anthropologist Margaret Mead in the 1950s, Ella Cara Deloria recalled her formative years as a “collector” of D/L/Nakota tales.¹ Telling her own artful story, Deloria remembered how she used to escape from her mission school, St. Elizabeth’s, to spend long hours absorbing the tales of the elder Hunkpapaya and Sihasapa Lakotas, who were there “to visit their children . . . and to draw rations at the substation.” Lingering at the Lakota encampments until her family had to “send out an alarm” to locate her, Deloria absorbed the details of a world...

In her autobiography,Dust Tracks on a Road(1942), Zora Neale Hurston vividly recounts her earliest exposure to the folklore of her people. Lingering on the porch of Joe Clarke’s store, “the heart and spring” of her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, a young Hurston would often catch fragments of forbidden talk, the talk of men: “sly references to the physical condition of women, irregular love affairs, brags on male potency by the party of the first part, and the like.” Though she didn’t understand the implications of their talk until she “was out of college and doing research in Anthropology,” Hurston...

Zora Neale Hurston was not the only folklorist returning to her home turf in the summer of 1929. That same year, Jovita González, a young Mexican American woman from the borderlands, returned to the place of her birth to conduct research into the social history of her people. Although she pursued her research rigorously— interviewing informants in the counties that bordered the Rio Grande and perusing government records on both sides of the border—in many ways González was uncovering a story she already knew.Indeed,González’s discovery of ethnographic meaning making—­like Hurston’s and Ella Deloria’s—signified both an introduction and...

In the winter of 1936, Zora Neale Hurston was in Haiti conducting research for her blurred-genre ethnography,Tell My Horse. Funded by a Guggenheim fellowship, she spent her days traveling across the country interviewing politicians, workers, and voodoo priests. Her nights were spent in an artistic fever, writing a story that had been “dammed up” inside of her since her final departure from New York earlier that year. She worked on the project intensely, often writing late into the night after a full day of collecting. At the end of seven weeks, she had completed her second novel and perhaps...

In the summer of 1940, just six months before she began the process of transforming ten years of field notes into three separate manuscripts—The Dakota Way of Life, Speaking of Indians,andWaterlily—Ella Deloria found herself in Pembroke, North Carolina. She had been drawn there by the promise of six months of steady pay. Her assignment—under the joint auspices of the Farm Security Administration and the Indian Service—was to study the linguistic and cultural practices of a mixed-race community in Robeson County.¹ The community, variously known as the “Croatans,” “Cherokees,” “Siouans,” or “Su-ons,” claimed Indigenous origin...

In 1936, on the eve of Zora Neale Hurston’s departure to the Caribbean for what would be her last major ethnographic expedition, she wrote a letter to an Alabama librarian, William Stanley Hoole. In her letter, Hurston laid out the basic plot for a book that she had been kicking around for some time. It would be her follow-up novel toJonah’s Gourd Vine, and in it she would tell the story of a brown woman:

Who was from childhood hungry for life and the earth, but because she had beautiful hair was always being skotched upon a flag-pole by...

In the late 1930s Jovita González and her friend Margaret Eimer began working on “a historical novel of the Border during the Mexican War” entitled “All This is Mine.”¹ They started working on the manuscript in Del Rio, Texas, where González and her husband worked as teachers, and they continued to collaborate after relocating to different cities: González to Corpus Christi with her husband, Edmundo Mireles, and Eimer to Joplin, Missouri, with a relative, “Pop” Eimer.² Over the next decade or so, González and Eimer collaborated on the manuscript long-distance, sending revised copies to one other by U.S. mail and,...

What does it mean to turn from regimes of description that center on disconnection, objectivity, and distance, and embrace modes of telling founded on connection, subjectivity, and intimacy; to “cross that line,” as Virginia Dominguez puts it, that demarcates the intellectual safety of objective truth from the “untrustworthy” realm of subjective emotions; to shift, as did Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jovita González, from dispassionate scholarship to passionate praxis? What does it mean to write about love in times of war? To reclaim love’s erotic, poetic, and political power, its ability to bridge difference and create new solidarities, to...