“My father was a Mexicophile, and the whole time I was growing up I was surrounded by paintings and music from Mexico. We would drive there every summer starting when I was five, and I remember passing through El Paso.
“I spent my junior year of high school in Spain, and I really learned my Spanish. After I graduated, in ’71, I went on a foreign program to the University of the Andes, in Venezuela, and I was in charge of translating for the visiting guests and professors.
“I returned to New York and enrolled at SUNY Binghamton. I majored in Spanish and anthropology, but since I had already lived in Europe and Latin America, I wasn’t excited at being an undergraduate, so I went back to the Mediterranean and studied archeology, history, early Spanish, the orthographies, but Europe seemed tired and boring to me.
“After my junior year of college, I hitchhiked to Guatemala and joined a dig. I found the indigenous people working the site more interesting than the excavation – the living were more interesting than the dead – so when I started graduate school in Albany, I joined an anthropology program in Mezzo-American studies, but after a year, I went on leave to work in Guatemala on a community development project, after the earthquake.
“This was just before the time of the Contras, in the late 70’s, and Guatemala was being used by the CIA as a sort of proxy state. A group of immature urban leftists tried to establish a front in the indigenous areas, and that basically got a lot of Indians killed. The Indians called it ‘the time of the evil men’, when everybody was killing each other, so I found myself having to leave Guatemala because as the months progressed, the political situation kept getting worse.
“I crossed the border to San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, which in those days was a sleepy, forgotten state in Mexico, and I joined the last remnants of the Harvard Chiapas Project. They sent me back into the jungle to study the diaspora of a group of Tzotzil Mayans. I went back and forth a lot between school and fieldwork, and I finally finished my dissertation and got my Ph.D. in 1984.
“I got married to a fellow student I had met in the field, and we moved to New Hampshire together when I got my first teaching job at Dartmouth. A couple of years later, I took a job at in a real nice graduate program in Nashville, at Vanderbilt, where I would take students to Mexico for the summer. I could have stayed there, but my wife wanted to get into a linguistics program at UT, so we moved to Austin.
“It was one of those ‘I followed you, now you follow for me’ things, but the closest I could find a job was 100 miles away at Texas A&M where I worked on a research project examining the impact of tourism on an indigenous town in Guatemala.
“By this time, we had two children, and then my wife became ill and bedridden with chronic fatigue syndrome. I had to cook and take care of everyone, and I was commuting 200 miles a day. It put a serious crimp on my time.
“The program at A&M was dominated by archeologists with antiquated notions, and things were starting to get fairly oppressive, so to avoid some inevitable conflicts, I jumped from the anthropology to the architecture department. They were launching a project about border colonias, and that opened a second area of research to me, and by ‘95, I started to visit El Paso with much regularity.
“A&M wanted me to move to College Station, but my wife desperately didn’t want to, so I realized I needed to find another job. That’s when the directorship of the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies opened up at UTEP, and I got it.
“The Center wasn’t well staffed, and it was divided between the Border Studies and Latin American Studies departments. The Border Studies people thought there was no reason to study some far off place when Latin America was right here, but the Latin American people thought that Border Studies was lowbrow. My idea was that all Latin American studies should be Inter-American Studies, so I wrote and got a Ford grant addressing this problem.
“I was just getting into the thick of things that summer when my wife said she wanted to leave. It’s hard to know all the reasons, but part of her imagined herself to have gotten ill by Latin America, and she had an emotional reaction to everything Mexican. When she found that El Paso was essentially a Mexican town, she wanted out. She wanted to raise her children in a different environment, and when she took off back east with the kids to spend the summer with her mother, she didn’t return.
“The year after she left, two things happened: In the spring, I had a house fire that destroyed a lot of my stuff, and in the summer the administration sort of said they didn’t want me to be the director of the Center anymore, without any explanation as to why.
“The grant was going well, and some people speculated the administration felt I wasn’t a big enough fish to properly represent them, but my orientation ideologically was closer to the Ford Foundation’s than theirs ever was.
“I was still teaching, but it looked as though I was expected to leave. The rumor was ‘put up with him for a year and get him out of here; adjudicate him as not capable, and maybe he’ll go somewhere else.’ It took some insisting upon to remind them that the department had promised me a tenure track, and that may have been the beginning of the end for tenure at UTEP and me.
“There I was, standing in the ashes of my marriage and my house, teaching Mezzo-American culture in a department dominated by sociologists who treated me like a piece of dead meat; but over the next six years, I went back and did good research in Chiapas, brought students into the field, worked with professors at other universities, was published, and I got great recommendations from high-end colleagues. I participated in the faculty senate, and on committees. I gave cultural sensitivity workshops to staff members, I led alumni trips, I taught those life-long learning classes – I did my social services at every level, I did it all. My first semester teaching at UTEP, I got a ranking of two out of five, which is not real high, but from then on, I got a three, and then I got fives for the remaining six years. I worked my way back to being respected, a major player in my field.
“Tenure’s supposed to be decided by a committee in your department, and if it’s split, it goes to the college of liberal arts, and if it’s still split, it goes to the dean, then the provost, and finally the president. If it’s unanimous everywhere, it’s considered to be a pro forma process. I am told that everybody supported me – my department, the dean, the provost, everybody but one person – that person had to be Natalicio – and I was denied tenure.
“I didn’t get a letter saying my teaching wasn’t adequate, or that my service to the community or my academic record was insufficient. There’s no mention of any evaluation by those criteria.
“My theories are speculative, but I believe the reason I was targeted was because the dominant message in most border institutions is about indigenous acculturation into the European and American humanities, but my instruction questioned the domination of those institutions by contemplating the genius of the new world. I was teaching my students about the belief systems, the philosophy and religion, the cosmology of the Mezzo-American cultures, and that’s not what the university wanted. My efforts were for people of indigenous descent to know about indigenous culture and heritage, but there’s no imperative for Mexicans to know about Anahuac, or about their Aztec or Mayan or Tarahumaric heritage.
“It’s about ghettoization. Brown people can study brown culture, and black people can study black culture, but everybody is supposed to study Anglo culture. If we have white people teaching blacks, and if brown people are teaching whatever, the informal apartheid of academia gets all screwed up.
“No one ever talks about the Hispanicizing of the Anglos on the border. Their whole idea of trying to have equity is supposed to be about Hispanic or Mexican people becoming more Anglicized, but the opposite happens, too; we just don’t talk about it.
“I had the right to appeal the rejection, but I was ambivalent. I don’t want other people to go through the same thing I did, but I didn’t want to be obsessed about my having been turned down so unjustly, by a capricious act, and for that to undo my ability to keep my own trajectory going.
“I remember what somebody told me when I first came to El Paso eight years ago. He said that there were all sorts of potentials and possibilities here, but for one reason or another, every opportunity was lost, it was wasted. There’s kind of a ni hacen ni dejan attitude here, they don’t do and they don’t let do. Everyone thinks it’s their own little fiefdom and they’re going to run it their way, they’re not going to let anything forward-thinking take hold.
“El Paso’s still doing 20th century stuff in a 21st century world. El Paso’s still worried about where the maquilas are going, and it’s still thinking that its real resource is the sun, or the alligators. It thinks its future is a big medical center or retirement community. UTEP’s still putting out oil engineers and computer techs, but El Paso can’t compete with the big hitters in the physical sciences; UTEP will always be a third-rate institution on those things.
“UTEP should be putting its resources in the social sciences because El Paso’s real strength is the quantity of people here who speak two languages and who simultaneously manage two cultures. This is a remarkable place for how little there is in the way of racism. That’s the real resource that El Paso should be developing, because it has it in abundance, and the rest of the United States could use it.
“El Paso has wonderful strength, wonderful resources and skills, but it’s going this way and the world’s going that way. All I can say is pobrecito El Paso, because there’s intellectual carpetbagging going on. When someone highly evaluated in his field is denied tenure here, a more intellectually developed Northeastern university will grab them in a heartbeat.
“I had no trouble getting another position. I got a job at a small private university outside Boston called Clark that has a graduate program specifically focused on international community development – that’s what I do – and I only have to teach two classes a term. My fiancée Judy [Marcus] is going with me, and it’s where my daughter goes to school. My son is still in high school, only two hours away, so from a family standpoint, it’s wonderful.
“I’m getting paid more, and I’ll have fewer courses with better students, but on the other hand, I got a special gratification teaching direct descendants of the ancient Mezzo-American civilizations about their own culture. I’m leaving the students at UTEP from Juarez and El Paso, who need me more, and I’ll be teaching up in snowy Massachusetts to privileged people who always get the good stuff, and that’s the story, I don’t know what else to say.”
