Saturday, April 13, 2013

Meeting Our Obligations as Scholars & Writers



This past month I had a conversation with a scholar friend whose work I admire greatly. He told me that he had "finished his obligations" to his field and was now engaged in a work outside of it that had captured his imagination. Given his enthusiasm and the fact that he is such a talented historian, he is likely to do a great work, and possibly even find recognition in a new field.

That conversation made me think of the obligations that scholars have to their disciplines. I don't just mean doing the best work we can and being honest in how we construct our work. I mean doing work that we know has to be done in order for our field to prosper, and which we know we are the most likely person either because of skill or circumstances to do it. Often, these works take us away from some of the things we want to do and sometimes require that we do some retraining and to shift our focus. There is no doubt that they are a challenge and that is why they are a particularly important service that we do for the field.

The scholarly world, unfortunately, is so reflective of a society which tends to be too individualistic. People today tend to first seek "to find themselves" and to provide "for their needs",  and have less time to think of  their obligations. In general writing we can see the abundance of "personal" memoirs which offer almost nothing but individual reflections about nothing. Now, I do think that some have their place and some can actually be valuable, but too many of them reflect a society of individuals that only think about their wants..

I have a friend who says that too many scholars are "independent contractors" who simply want to be left alone. No doubt that many of us entered the academy to have our space and to do things that we like and believe to be important. Scholars, and writers for that matter, can be a strange breed and sometimes our world will be inhabited only by us and an occasional visitor. But even then we are not freed from the obligation to give back, and to do it in the best way that we can and that is through our scholarship and our writing.

I am a great admirer of Professor Rudy Acuna who is seen by some as the father of Chicano Studies. He is a prolific writer but his greatest contribution is the fact that he tries to never let "bull" go unchallenged. We don't always agree and he has at times been a ferociouos critic of mine but he has also defended me when I have been accused unjustly. What I like most about him is that he sees it as his obligation to keep mentoring students and keep writing what I call "obligatory" scholarship to keep the field moving forward. He may not see it as an obligation or a service but it surely is valuable to most of us in the field and to students who still flock around him at conferences.

I think we all know of people like that. They are conscious of the blessing of writing (and teaching) as a career. And while they could simply focus on the next book they want to write, they choose to keep an eye for things that ought to be done, and if they can't do it themselves they encourage and support others who can. It is an example to those young scholars and writers who are starting out, and probably for older writers and scholars too, in how to frame their careers. Being a part of the whole,
sharing our talents, being worried about what happens in the field and among those who follow our writing is the one way that we can find fulfilment in our lives, even as we periodically "do our own thing".

It is the way that we progress ourselves. As our fields evolve we do so too. And in the end, those are some of the most fulfilling works we will ever do. They will challenge us in ways that will make us grow because they expand our horizons, and often make us tackle topics we are "unsure of". I remember when I decided to write a biography on Hector P. Garcia, one of the giants of Mexican American history. No one had undertaken that chore and yet so much was being written about his era, and of course, as it is often common in our field, people were simply repeating the couple of paragraphs we knew about his life. I did not particularly like the man--he was still alive but died just before I started the work--and as a young Chicano activist he had been "the enemy". Yet, I could not see how the field was to progress without us knowing more about his life and his politics. In the process of writing the book I came to greatly admire the man and his co-horts, though truth be told I never did learn to like his personality.

At the moment, I am in the process of researching what will probably be the last "obligatory history" of my career. But after all these years, this "obligatory" history is as big a part of the history that I want to do as my recently completed book on Chicanos and basketball which was a change of course for me. In some ways, though, that too was obligatory for me because it was a story that I believed needed to be told, and it was also a way of putting some meat in the area of Chicano sports which is currently vegetarian at best. More important was my desire to see the history of Mexican Americans told in all its variety.  This new work is an intellectual biography on one of the intellectual precursors of the Chicano civil rights movement. I think we need to know about him in order to understand this movement, at the same time he is such a complex and interesting scholar that I am excited about using all the skills I have acquired to tell his story. Many of those skills I learned not only by writing what I wanted to write but also by writing those works that I felt needed to be written.

So, the next time we sit down to plan the rest of our lives, let's remember that there are works that need to be done, and that not too many people are lining up to do them. I'm sure that we will find room for them in our future, and the field and many colleagues--some still in high school--will be better for it.