Some of you might know of me while many others probably don't or at least not as a scholar/writer--those in the last category are my friends and they don't need to know nor do they care much about what I do professionally. To them soy amigo. I decided to create this blog because I am expanding my writing to include more essays, memoir and fiction. I am not abandoning my scholarly work, just adding to my repertoire. From a young age I wanted to write. I didn't particularly care what I was writing. I started writing short stories, church plays, then went to sports as a sports writer/editor and eventually became a historian. But during that process I maintained an interest in all types of writing and continued to write short stories, plays, essays and a novel but did little to publish them.
A couple of years ago, however, I decided to expand beyond writing about civil rights and Chicano politics. My upcoming book (2013) tentatively titled When Mexicans Could Play Ball is my first major move away from the traditional scholarly work, though it still falls within that genre. But it allowed me a freedom that traditional scholarship has not, even though I do have a more accessible style than most academicians--at least that is what regular folks say.
I was told I needed a blog in order to get more people reading my material. At first I resisted for the same reasons some people do but then realized that blogging could provide me a forum for the type of writings and discussions that I crave. I come to this much older than most and so amigos, companeras/os, blogeros patience and help. At the moment, my daughter with the help of her 13-year-old son, are doing much of the technical work. But I'm a quick learner.
I am hoping to engage in some good conversations about writing, scholarship, politics, religion, literature and other topics that will come up. This is something I love to do since I first discovered C.S. Lewis, Enriqueta Vasquez and Octavio Paz. To that group I could add David Thoreau, Rudy Acuna, Margarita Melville, Eliza Snow and a host of other writer/intellectuals. And also the viejito who lived next door to our house when I was still in elementary school. He would gather the barrio kids and tell us stories about la llorona and the Mexican Revolution. That is one reason I became an historian.
This blog will have a somewhat Chicano/Latino tilt, but Chican/Latinos are people too and we talk and think across boundaries all the time. We are a universal people and our thoughts are as important as anyone else's. In fact, I think that is the one boundary that we Latino intellectuals have to cross more often--though some have been doing it for quite a while. We are often known as people who "know their own" but not much of anyone else. People who think that way have never been to the Chicano kitchen table, the Latino bodega, the Tejano ice house, or la calle ocho in Miami; or for that matter the plaza in Havana, Cuba, the Zocalo in Mexico City and the public and privates spaces of much of the rest of Latin American. Hablamos mucho y de mucho.
But more than anything else it will be about the written word and how it contextualizes everything we practice. No it won't be about postmodernism or deconstruction or any of that other literary criticsm stuff, though English people are welcomed.
A couple more things about myself to make sure you get my context. I was born in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas in 1950 but migrated with my parents to San Antonio, Texas when I was about six. I'm a Viet Nam veteran, was a journalist who did the religion beat, weeklies, sports and once worked for Nuestro magazine, still in my mind the best Latino magazine while it existed. I was an activist in the Chicano Movement and once ran for office on La Raza Unida Party ticket.
I'm also a Mormon, in fact, I served twice as a bishop in different congregations. I cherish those times. I consider myself pretty much a progressive but am morally conservative when it comes to my personal life style, and to people's conduct. I don't get into the culture wars from the right or the left and I refrain from personal attacks and expect those who comment to do the same. I believe in debate but not in pleitos. I will post at least every Thursday but will occasionally take the liberty of posting more than once a week. Hope that you will join me and make this your landscape as much as mine.
Next time: Why do Chicano/Chicana scholars write so few books? (no answers, just a lot of questions and conjecture about writing among that select group)
