Gathering Seeds for our Writing

It has been a while since I last wrote and its all because I've been quite busy trying to put together presentations and essays for both this summer and the fall. After that, I'm hoping to slow down a bit and concentrate on my biography and some fictional work that I've got to finish. I said earlier that I was going to slow down but I made no specific plan to do so and before I knew it I was again over committed. Much of the work to be done is not urgent, meaning that I have the time to do it, but it does take its toll. More important, it keeps me from doing other things, like reading, taking long walks or invigorating old acquaintances. All of those are important to a writer and historians as it is in being engaged that we get our ideas and our story plots.
I have a new friend in San Antonio--Julian--who is the ultimate writer. When I got a chance to meet him for the first time, he spoke about how he got his story ideas, most of which came in conversations with friends, acquaintances, strangers and anyone he met during the day. While he, I and two other friends talked and joked, he was counting out the story ideas that he gathered from our conversations. He is a funny guy and had us laughing out loud but he never lost his writer's radar. He reminded me--not that I need to be, though a friend there was learning something for the first time--that writers/historians/playwrights, etc. hear conversations and see things differently from others who engage in conversation and view things for their immediate impact. Those who engage the written word should always be deciphering, assessing and storing information. At the same time, we can't be like movie critics who go to the movies and never enjoy them because they are deconstructing and reviewing instead of watching. We must watch, listen but hopefully we've trained our ears and other senses to quickly pick up things and to store them.
That is why it is important to have journals and notebooks where we write our impressions and retell the day's activities and things we learned. Sharing them in letters or e-mails with people who will engage with them is also a good idea.I don't do as great a job as I should but I do have numerous journals and notebooks all over the house and office with tidbits, paragraphs and other notes--and numerous e-mail discussions with friends and colleagues--and at one time or another I've come back to them for insight or simply for ideas.
I never leave home--that is for long trips--without some notebook or journal because I find that in buses, airplanes and hotel rooms I always have something to write about. Most important in having these notebooks is that I don't have to make too much sense or write beautiful paragraphs because these are simply ideas, phrases or words that will jar something within me, usually days, months or even years later. They are valuable because they are raw and written with the passion felt at the moment. Unlike notes that we take for a research project or an academic essay they are not just reference points or attributions, they all are, or can be, seeds for further thought.
I knew a fellow years ago who use to carry a small recorder around with him so that he could record himself or others and then take time to listen to what he had heard and said during the day. We have all faced the situation that we remember we said, heard, or thought of something "brilliant" but can't remember what it was.
Most writing is an accumulation of things we've heard, thought of, said, read or experienced. Even scholarly work is developed in such a manner. Yet, because we are at times lax in "gathering and taking it home with us" we lose the seed of what could be important work. There are accumulated somewhere in the space that hovers over us many books and articles, short stories, plays and novels that will never be written because we misplaced or never collected the ideas. I actually think that is the reason why some smart, good writers never go beyond the stage of "wishing" to write a good work. Or they write the first one but can't never get the second one out. They think that all they have to do is research and plan out a project and the inspiration will come. But it doesn't work that way. Ideas like seeds must be watered and fed constantly, often times long before we start trying to put them into written form. When we gather and accumulate those seeds, we don't always know what will grow but we are certain that in time we will be weeding, fertilizing, pruning and then stepping back to watch something grow. Writing is often like that.  It is the end product of a long process that can take months, years and even decades. The seed for my latest book I gathered nearly 30 years ago and my novel was likewise a flowering of something gathered and begun nearly that long ago.
When we gather seeds, create works and then spread the seeds that come of them we are likely to find that they too will blossom though it may take a long time. That approach has made me productive and I always have more than one idea floating in my head, the key, however, is that those are seeds which have been nurtured for years and been germinating just as long. So even when it seems that I've come up with a "new" idea, it is usually not that new.

Memory in Writing

I think that most of us know--or at least have been told--that we cannot depend on memory to write something factual or to tell a story accurately. While mostly true I've found that memory--that is the reconstruction of a personal experience using recollection--can be of great use when we take it as it comes and not try to rework it to symbolized something it did not when it happened. It might be part of a building block of something today, but it was not "assigned" that task when it happened. It just happened because of circumstances or decisions made.
I'll provide an example: when I was in Viet Nam a fellow with a head wound was brought to the dispensary emergency room that I ran, and the doctors immediately recognized that he had to be sent to a surgical trauma unit or he would die. The closest one was in Saigon several hundred miles away. Since I was the medic in charge I was assigned to take him to the army hospital nearby so that he could be medevac to the capital city. But my instructions were quite explicit, he needed to get to Saigon without delay.
When the chopper I was on arrived at the army hospital three miles away, the chopper that was to take him was not ready so I decided to take him to Saigon in our chopper. It was a traumatic experience that lasted for hours and remained imprinted in my mind until today. When I began to write about this experience, I went and took out my Viet Nam journal and looked for details. All I found was that I had taken the soldier to the army hospital, nothing about the chopper not being ready, about the breakdown of our suction machine, of being covered in blood and standing for hours because there was no room in the chopper for the medics and the patient, and nothing about my feelings when I came home. I was shocked because the details were so vivid but I had no record of it though I would later find some references to the incident. Since I had never written anything about it or told the story it was not a matter of having incorporated later thoughts into my memory, or having dreamt up the whole thing.
Though not impossible, it would have been extremely difficult to have found the records of the incident so I decided to write about the incident from memory. To this day, I can remember most of the details. In remembering them I can see how consistent I have been in the way I've thought and acted most of my life. I've evolved, matured and changed some things about myself but I'm still very much like that young man who took charge of the situation even while being completely horrified by the obligation of keeping someone alive.
So what can I say about memory through this incident? First, that it doesn't always correlate to the record, that it is subjective, reflects one's character, and that it serves to provide significance to things that are currently significant to one. Memory provides perspective and crystalizes history with today's prism but doesn't change it unless we choose to manipulate the facts. In other words, rarely does memory contradict our thoughts today, and if it does, it is because internally we are still conflicted about the ways we see things, and more importantly the way we want to remember ourselves.
So how should we use memory and why should we even trust it? The answer is that we trust it to say much about our personal history. How we acted back then--interpreted today--describes one aspect of our life, and how we remember that action says something about how we see life. The fact we were in a time and place and that we took particular actions in of themselves serve as a "material culture" that can be examined to understand ourselves and the topics we write about. That we choose to remember some past events over others says much about our today but it also says much about our yesterday. Unless we simply invent an event, those we remember are those that engrained themselves for a reason. In the case of my remembered event it was its traumatic nature that made it so memorable.
My using in to tell my story is important not only because of what it says about me today but also about what was important to me when it happened. The incident, if told in detail, casts light on my relationships with the soldiers in the dispensary, with a Vietnamese nurse, with the sarge in charge, and says much about my views of the war and death itself. Since I made so many mistakes and the soldier ended up dying, the incident did not necessarily reveal me in a good light. In fact, the only time I shared the written version with some students their reaction was that I was insensitive to death because in trying to escape the trauma I focused on my date that day. It was not exactly what I wanted to hear, but regardless of what they thought the event was important in understanding both my experiences in war and what was fundamental to my character then and now.
We don't write history by memory but we can assess our view of life by those things we remember and by the way we remember them. I've always known that I have an exaggerated view of myself but I also hate the idea of inventing things simply to get a point across which is often a trait common in today's memoirs. So my view is that you can provide particular meaning to events in your past but you just can't invent situations, characters and dialogue--the most common "lie"--to write memoir. To do so devalues the actual experience, and creates a memory that did not exist. Facts, dates, characters, setting, etc. count and they count very much. How we organize them may have to do with what we want to say but the organization does not justify inventing a new set of characters, events or places. Or provide a meaning so foreign to the actual occurrence that it pushes it into the realm of make believe. 
Invention is not memoir, it is fiction. And fiction is best written as such no matter what it might say about us. I did just that in my novel Can Tho where I was able to be a great guy, hero and incredibly romantic.
Just before I sent this out, I was quite sick with a stomach flu and I sat outside in my garage listening to "oldies music". As I did, I remembered how much a part of my life that music was and then realized I did not mention it in my memoir. Did I mischaracterized my life for the purpose of presenting myself in a particular way? No, I just chose one aspect of my life that is the most enduring and that says the most about me. I have no doubt that I will speak of my taste in music somewhere else. In fact, I've already began planning the next "life story" and the Beatles, Sam Cooke, Elvis, Martha and the...

Letters from Garcia: Extreme Writing Polarizes & Does Little Good

Letters from Garcia: Extreme Writing Polarizes & Does Little Good: Recently I've been a little concern with the kind of extreme verbal fights that are now common in the internet and which often promote t...

Extreme Writing Polarizes & Does Little Good

Recently I've been a little concern with the kind of extreme verbal fights that are now common in the internet and which often promote themselves as discussions or intellectual critiques. Today, anyone, including people who should know better, write in extreme forms, accusing anyone with whom they disagree of somehow being sick, evil, or idiots. These accusations are usually misinformed and very counterproductive.
Now, let me state right off that I am not talking about expressing radical politics or even radical ideas. While those might be seen as extreme most "legitimate" radical ideas have a long history and have been created over a period of time. They might not work and they too might create polarization but for the most part they must be acknowledged to have come out of experience and much thought. But not so extreme writing, which in today's world is usually an accusation, followed by name calling, and then a refusal to entertain a different point of view. Most of the time, this extreme writing is written by frustrated individuals who search the internet for things they disagree with, and who then feel empowered because they can say things from a distance and win their arguments because they bring the argument into their facebook or tweeter space and thus control--including the power to delete--what is said. These people present themselves as rather enlightened and use (self)righteous indignation as a source of authority for their views.
Like calling out "fire" or asking "when did you stop abusing your spouse" the damage is done even before the debate has begun or the evidence has been presented. Neither side of the political divide has a monopoly on this kind of extreme writing but the reality is that most people who engage in this kind of communication rarely ever represent any kind of reasoned or thought out philosophy, political or otherwise.
I consider myself to have once been a strong proponent of the left and I have the history to prove it, but even at the height of my radicalism I did not buy into extreme speech, writing or action. I always saw extreme expression, and still do, as the work of people with small minds who cannot conjure up the words, sentences or actions that express a sane though possibly radical view point.
I remember being involved in a political campaign for a Chicano third-party that was running against entrenched interests. We were in a tight race when a fellow right out of law school joined our community and "our side". I remember driving with him one day to put up some political posters when he jumped out of the car to rip the posters of one of the political opponents. He also had a habit of making disparaging personal remarks about the opposition, and was always critical of those of us who didn't.
We had an underground newspaper which was well-respected in the community. In many ways it provided a more radical assessment of the political situation than was normal in that slightly conservative community, but people respected the well-written and insightful analysis, and because for the most part even our satire had its limits and was in good taste.
This fellow, a friend of some of the older activists, became critical because we did not engage in what he called "chingaderas" which is a vulgar terms for no-holds bar personal attacks.
When I see or hear extreme language I'm always reminded of him because in the end he proved divisive and helped destroyed what had taken us years to develop in terms of community support and respect, activist solidarity and because when the going got tough he simply dropped out and went on to a lucrative law practice, leaving behind a devastated group of community organizers who saw their hard-fought work destroyed by extreme rhetoric and behavior.
Today, we have individuals who are ready to attack anything that they don't agree with, and to make personal attacks even if they don't know the person. The sadder part of this is that even professionals that should know better have taken up this approach to discussion and debates in the public square. This type of attitude is legitimized by television networks that engage in the same type of extreme speech though they might have to clean up the language a bit to be on the air. On the right, you have Fox News and on the left you have MSNBC. Yet, neither of them are really a "radical" voice because they offer no real blueprint for a fairer society, only platitudes for their political side. With few exceptions they simply engage in politic and ideological bomb throwing, thus, we get no real conversations.
Intellectuals and writers should think about what they do when they enter the debate on one side or another. Given their abilities to speak or to write they should make sure they are not sucked into endless lamentations and personal attacks. Any good conservative or leftist should be able to see that this country's political debate is one among high paid elites who despite their rhetoric do very little for the guy and woman at the bottom of the barrel, and who offer no way to resolve our problems or bring our people together.
Being thoughtful and mature in the way we use our words does not mean we compromise on principles or that we are not willing to wage the kind of rhetorical war that sometimes is needed to make change. It simply means that we are open about how we see things, that we acknowledge that the opposition sometimes has some validity in what it says even if they say it in a misguided way or for selfish reasons. When conservatives say that all people receiving government aid are leechers or when  liberals says that all poor people are desperately looking to get off welfare, they are both wrong. Those of us who actually live on the ground, who have normal people for friends, and who can walk and chew gum at the same time know that not all people leech but that there are some who do.
When I began writing I said that I would try to write from the ground up, that I would admit when my politics and ideals were wrong or did not work, and that I would articulate a message that people understood even if they disagreed with. I was going to allow life to actually complicate my writing and thinking and to teach me something I did not already know.
While often critical and sometimes petty I have also been willing to swallow my pride and admit publicly when I'm wrong because I have set out to be like the people I grew up admiring who knew how to own up to their mistakes. I also learned a great lesson while young and that was to listen to your elders, respect those who have more experience and training, but be willing to pushback when you think they are wrong. But first listen and respect. Today, many of the internet vipers are usually young who think they know much, or old who still think they are young intellectuals. Most are naïve, idealistic but with a critical strain and most are disappointingly quite self-righteous. They don't listen to arguments but only "detect" words and phrases that automatically trigger a response, and they are good at demonizing those with whom they disagree, calling them "idiots" or some other derogatory name.
The "scholarly and intellectual community" has helped create these creatures by becoming excessively "deconstructionist" and obsessively into conclusions even when the jury is still out on a matter. I'm reminded of the Chicano intellectual Octavio Romano who use to say that academic scholars were mostly "mercenaries" who marginalized people by constantly pointing out their flaws. They were the ones who often dichotomize people branding some of them good and others as not so good.
Don't get me wrong, I believe there is a lot of nonsense that is paraded around as in depth and serious thinking, and sometimes it is a temptation to push back, but to do so at every instance and immediately after reading every disagreeable post is to engage in what is an illusional discussion with no ground rules and too much personal capital involved. It is a snake pit where there is little possibility of escaping with dignity.
I lament that we cannot disagree without being disagreeable and that we cannot see beyond our ideologies, religion, personal quirks or politics. I am distraught by our unwillingness to listen, to asses an argument, and rebut the bad points while acknowledging that there are things that we have overlooked or have not dealt with adequately. I know that civility can often create asymmetric ground rules to the advantage of the status quo, but nonetheless a good argument can often expose the fallacy of those whose thinking is murky and unwise. We may not win the debate but our well chosen words can leave a testament to what is wrong with the other side's views that eventually others will pick up to carry on the battle.
The internet has the possibility of creating a real democratic public square where even the lowliest of us can participate, but so often it simply creates a forum for the most extreme, arrogant and unwise voices in our society.

Writing About Faith While Chicano

Recently I was notified that my memoir/autobiography which is tentatively titled "A Journey Commenced: The Early Years of an Engaged Life" will soon be sent out to reviewers to see if makes it to the following stage. This is the second time that my manuscript makes it to this stage, though the earlier version was less about my faith and more about my growing up Chicano. The reviewers' recommendations were mixed though both thought it was a good book project. The one reviewer that did not fully recommend publication did so because he/she wanted me to extend the book to cover all of my life and to say more about my faith. I had no desire to add more pages to it, and I also wanted to follow the lead of great autobiographies in my field which are usually limited to the early life. I also hoped that the manuscript would be the first of a number of works dealing with some of my private thoughts and with other personal experiences.
At the time there had not yet been a "Mormon Moment", Mitt Romney had not gotten past the Republican primary, and the Mormon musical had yet to appear and break all kinds of attendance records on Broadway. Needless to say, the press was unsure of the book's reception and so they eventually rejected it. Three years later I met the same editor who had recommended refusal and she apologized. "I was green and did not know who you were", etc.. She asked me to resubmit but after some discussion with her decided that it was good that I had not gone with that particular press. At the end of the past year, however, someone recommended that I submit it to another press, one that was interested in Mormon studies. I hesitated because my work is not Mormon studies, but I was convinced--by others--that it was a legitimate work in the larger context of works on Mormons given that I'm a recognized scholar that happens to be Mormon.
By then, I had already decided to write more candidly about my faith which is foundational to my scholarship and my activism. While I had a specific chapter in my first manuscript on my beliefs I had mostly focused on my growing up years, Viet Nam and my involvement in the Chicano Movement. This time I simply chose to ignore what others said and to interjected discussion of my faith's role wherever it fit naturally while retaining much of the earlier manuscript. In a way, it was a response to one other reviewer--a friend--who had characterized the original manuscript as too "religious" after only a quick perusal. A born-again Christian, I believe she over-reacted as sometimes religious people do to what other's might think. The two reviewers that actually read it came to the opposite conclusion.
The only thing that the new editor wanted was a short discussion on how this might fit into Mormon studies. Easy enough, I assumed. But the reality is that it was much harder to write that part than I thought. I became conscious of the fact that the press was taking a gamble simply because this was a book that spoke to two different audiences. A middle ground is really missing. If it had been a Catholic/Chicano discussion, it might be easier to imagine an audience. But Mormon/Chicano is a stretch. At the same time Mormonism's intellectual thought has been lacking color since its beginning. Even when Mormon intellectuals engage the issues of race or ethnicity, with few exceptions, they write as outsiders and rarely ever get to the heart of how people of color themselves think and act. They also rarely have the credentials to deal with the topic.
Where I come in is that I am an endowed professor of Chicano studies, a life-long member, a former bishop (twice) and someone who has publicly engaged in the issues that affect Latinos in the church for over three decades. I also happen to be the only Chicano (in the political and cultural sense of the word) at BYU.  So the gamble has been taken that the reviewers and hopefully then the readers will bridge the gap by realizing that Latinos are now the largest group within the church and are projected to possibly become the majority of Mormons worldwide.
As a scholar who has always sought to write from the bottom up, it has not been difficult to write about religion because religion is such a big part of those on the bottom. Sometimes churches are the only allies people down there have. At the same time, some people might see a Chicano Mormon as an oxymoron. While most people familiar with me or my work know I'm a Chicano Mormon few of them understand what that means. If I was lackadaisical in one or the other, or if I'd abandoned one because of the other, it would be easier to write about it. But I'm neither lackluster in my religion nor have I abandoned my activist scholarship. I am a product of both and to untangle their influence within me would entail laser-like surgery that would leave me a lifeless mess.
So, how do you speak to two audiences that are miles apart? At first I thought that would be the difficult part, but then I realized that the challenge came because I had never truly written about--outside my journals-- or articulated publicly the duality of my life experience and its foundational value to my principles. I had hinted at it here or there, made comments during a presentation or two but never fully engaged the subject with an audience outside a few friends.
As I began to write my second version of the manuscript I realized that I needed to make stops along the way to explain things that in the first version I did not have to because there was an assumption that those who read it had knowledge of what I wrote, or at least thought it important because I was a well-known Chicano historian. But when I began to engage a broader discussion of my life I knew that I had to explain to myself as much as to others, what my experiences growing up Mormon and Chicano really meant, and how they informed my actions, beliefs and biases. I discovered that "on the ground" experiences were often the things that gave meaning to my Chicanismo and Mormonismo. Given that I was experiencing things as one person and not two, both "ismos" were evolving together and becoming one. I realized that given situations caused one "ismo" to rise above the other but that the other remained close by.
Then last year I gave my first public lecture on being Mormon and Chicano. It was liberating to speak to two things dear to my heart and I was pleased with the reaction. In the audience was the head of BYU Church and Doctrine department and also a dear friend who directs the Center for Western Studies. They later asked me to give the plenary keynote to open the Mormon History Association conference this summer, probably one of the first nonMormon-Studies scholar to do such a thing. And I've just gotten asked to contribute an essay for a book on 21st century Mormonism with the suggestion that I speak about my participation in the Chicano civil rights movement.
All of this has caused me to look deeper inside of me, to uncover those hidden thoughts and actions, and to blend more tightly the experiences which have made me what I am. While all of my work has been informed by who I am, it is only recently that I have tried to understand how deep this intertwining goes. Now, rather that to speak to two audiences, I simply seek to speak to whomever listens. After all, most of the times audiences don't make writers or presenters, it is usually the writer who invites people to listen, read and discuss what they've heard or read and thus become an audience. And of course, the writing itself can transcend a given audiences--if it is any good--and create larger ones. My sense is that I've gotten a new opportunity and I've always made good on them. If the manuscript doesn't go anywhere it will still have been a good exercise in learning to write and think more clearly about who I am.

  

Avoiding Fiction while Writing it for the Screen

It may seem ludicrous for me to try to avoid "fiction" while writing what is basically just fiction. As mentioned at the end of last year, I am writing a screenplay based on my recently released book When Mexicans Could Play Ball and I now realize why most feature films based on real stories are rarely ever real history, and why most screenwriter don't even try to write real history. It is extremely hard. All genres of fiction have their dynamics, structure and goals and rarely do they have much to do with telling a true story. Screenwriting like other fiction has too many wings to fly and there are too many temptations to soar that most writers simply take off. In some ways, like post-modern history, the point is to express an idea or to tell a story and how you tell it is often more important than the story's facts.





It is hard to write history in history while respecting the screenwriting parameters and the same holds true for doing it in literature, plays, poetry, documentary film and novels. One would think that an exciting true story would have all the elements to have it told as "it occurred". Surely I thought so when seeking to make a real great story, with great characters, subplots and morals into a screenplay. I knew that there were techniques to master and I needed to be conscious that the camera was an important partner, and that producers, directors and actors all become co-writers in a screenplay, but I did not fully realized that the structure of the story would be "challenged" so dramatically or that I would need "other" elements to tell a story that seemed to have all of them already.





While the writing of history has changed much in the last few decades--or at least theoretically it has--there is still a need of some kind for a narrative, characters, and information that provides a particular time and space. And most of those have to be somewhat tangible in that we know they existed and they occurred in prescribed moments and places. Modern historians often take gigantic leaps but even they know that their "histories" must be "traceable" even if its with an approach different from theirs. In other words, we can't write about something that happened if it didn't happen, nor claim that it was in New York when it was in Chicago. There are tangibles and they must be respected no matter how creative we get at. There are "tangibles" in a screenplay but the delivery is even more important in the writing than the story itself or the facts. A good screenplay has a great story to tell but it neither has to be true or real. The point to be made is the most important aspect and that is why film has at times been as voyeuristic as any other form of writing. Voyeuristic history has never really worked.





The biggest challenge with writing for film is that time and space work differently on the screen and there is little of both. Screenwriters have to "abridge" years of events and personalities, most of which are much more complicated than can be depicted on screen in less than three hours. In abridging this information, screenwriters are "forced" to take shortcuts, collapse events, and "invent" bridges, be they fictional characters, monologues, or events, to make sure not only that the action moves forward but that by the end of the film we get "somewhere". This is probably why there are so few movies based on "a true story" that can be classified as good history.




Will I be able to do it? At this stage I'm not sure. I recognize that all genres have to be written within the context of their own parameters, and that I work with less space and time than I do when I write history books or even a novel. That has to sink in, but at the same time if I'm party to anything that says "based on a true story" I have the strong urge to keep it "true". I have to decide which is more important, to keep the the story "true" in a metaphysical sense or to keep it "accurate" or factual. I imagine that I will have to negotiate the demands of both the genre and my standards as a historian. But then, the likelihood of keeping the story as I write it once the director, producer, screenwriters get it (fingers crossed) is probably pretty slim. So, I will keep trying to avoid as much fiction as I can while I write in what is a genre of fiction. Sounds silly? Probably is, but I am both a writer and a historian and the tension will always be there.

"When Mexicans Could Play Ball": The Book is Out!

I break my self-imposed silence to announce the publication of my book When Mexicans Could Play Ball by the University of Texas Press. The link below will take you to a place in which you can order the book. I think it is probably my best work because it combines most of my skills, but I've said that before so I won't go into here again. I will be interviewed by Texas Public Radio this week and I'm scheduled to be at the San Antonio Book Fair this spring.

http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/garwhe

Last Post of the Year

The title says it all. I will not be writing in this blog for the rest of this year in order to concentrate on finishing up a work that I promised to finished by the end of the year but which will now more likely take to the middle of the spring. That work is the screenplay based on my upcoming book. Basically I will suspend most all other writing work and make no further commitments until I am finished. This is something hard for me but I've decided that from now on I need to be more focused and prioritize my writing. In the past, I would work simultaneously on different projects and allow one of them to "fight itself to the top" and it would be the one that I would finish first. That process served me well for a number of years but now I want to make a change.

I do so for a number of reasons but two of them are that a periodic change in approach to one's writing can be invigorating and break the monotony that often arises when we write. The other reason is that sometimes the "projects' fight" to be number one takes too long, especially with those works directly outside my professional responsibilities. It thus becomes easy to have new scholarly works intrude into my writing schedule, thus pushing some of  my other works further into the future. While I feel young and am in good health, I realize I have more projects in mind that I do years left, consequently prioritizing becomes important.

While I could still write this blog and other things while I focus on one particular work, I have chosen to make a mental and emotional commitment to one work at a time. When I finish the screenplay I will re-evaluate whether this is the right approach. My sense is that it will be.

When I started the blog I did so with the idea that I would do it for one year and then evaluate whether I wanted to continue. These next six weeks will allow me time to see if I miss writing it and whether I actually have something to say that matters. Being refreshed and having finished a very different type of writing project will give me a better perspective. The blog as untraditional as it was has been rather enjoyable and allowed me to talk about things that I think are important to a writer and a scholar, and the posts may well form the basis for a small booklet that I would love to write for young scholars who struggle with their writing.

If I do return it will be with the new emphasis that I wrote about two posting ago. To do that,  I will have to prepare. If I don't return it will have been a great experience.

So, have a wonderful Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year!

un amigo

Kennedy, Mexicans basketballers and Writing.

This semester I have been inundated with requests to speak at different venues about JFK because of the upcoming 50th anniversary of his assasination. Just this week I was asked to write an opinion piece for the Houston Chronicle's Op-ed page and next week I will be on the Travis Smiley radio show to talk about Kennedy and civil rights. Most of this is a result of having written a book on JFK and Mexican Americans years ago.

When the book first came out it was received well by reviewers and a number of the top people in my field but the larger response was almost non-existent. Now, almost 12 years later it is selling briskly and I'm getting all kinds of call for interviews and I even have a well-paid speaking engagement at the University of Houston this month to talk on Kennedy. When asked in a radio program earlier this week whether writing academic book "pays", I had to say yes, but usually not with large royalty checks, but in opportunities to engage the public, to give presentations, get promotion and tenure, and receive research grants. Writing in the academy is all about how it helps us in the classroom and in engaging the larger public.

When my book When Mexicans Could Play Ball comes out in January the focus of my lectures and presentations will be basketball, sports and class/race & ethnicity. Even though I mostly write about civil rights and politics, it is in this book that all the things I've written and experienced came together to inform a story. I'm simply doing what my first writing teacher told me and a lot of other disinterested Chicanitos in class, "write about things you know". Having been a coach for several church basketball teams, a sports writer for a couple of  years, having attended the same school and lived in the same barrios as the basketball players, and writting a lot on race, class and culture, helped me to write the story.

The thing I most liked about this project was the ability to use all the skills I could muster from both fiction and nonfiction writing. My drama classes on character development and plot, my creative nonfiction training on essayish imagery, and my sports journalism all came into play. I also used a bit of material culture analysis. I don't know that it is a great work but it is one of the best that I have done. More importantly, it taught me how to expand boundaries while maintaining the integrity of the historical discipline.

As I pick up from where I left off last year on one of my novels I know that I will be using a lot of historical analysis and "research" to move the story along. More than a decade before the book The Road came out I was experimenting with dialogue as storytelling. The ability to write dialogue comes from my self-taught skill of playwriting. Having written books that take different approaches makes me more confident in approaching any topic that interests me. I've come to realize that most scholars who are talented but not too productive are those who struggle to say what they really want to say. Most think it is a theoretical or methodological problem, but usually it is because they have not honed their skills enough to have their words catch up to their thoughts.

Earlier this week I was on the BYU-Radio program "This Will Take a While" with Dean Dunkin and we spoke on writing history and of course we wandered off to all the peripheral topics that come with such a discussion. I enjoyed it because it is not often that I get to talk about the writing process in any profound way, though I try in several of my history classes that focus on producing a "big paper". Most of the time, however, students are uninterested in learning skills beyond those absolutely necessary to write the final paper. And of course there is rarely time to explore all aspects of writing. I have discovered, and re-affirmed it again during the interview, that when we talk about writing we often learn something about our own writing and about the process itself.

While I planned to be creative and expansive in writing my biography on Octavio Romano I came out of the interview even more convinced that there are still other approaches that I can use to tell a better story. At the same time, I am more committed to not blurring the lines between scholarship and fiction, or better put to not let creativity become the story. All these writing techniques are simply a way to understand and to export knowledge more efficiently to the reader. It is not about creating imagery for the sake of selling a book or getting a prize or showing off my skills as a writer or historian.

I take seriously my responsibilities and especially so today when too many scholars are writing fiction with footnotes. I have seen some young scholars try to write work that can be appealing to a larger audience and they'll use some literary styles but most are not good enough at them to know when they cross boundaries. The fact that history is not a science per se and that often fiction can cover ground that documents or oral history can't does not justify making assumptions that are based simply on conjecture. As one article published said almost twenty years ago, historians are coming back to the narrative "but can they write?". In every academic or writing career, tiime will tell.

Changing "Letters from Garcia"

Today, I begin a change to "Letters from Garcia" and go from these long-winded, painfully constructed mini-essays to more informal and timely--and possibly just as winded--postings. The reason, or at least part of it, is that I have been able to say much of what I wanted to say about formal writing and scholarship already, and now I simply want to write and talk about where I'm going with my own writing, providing samples of it, discussing the experiences--triumphs, setbacks, doubts, biases-- that frame the works I jot down, all with the hope that it's useful to others who write and engage in the intellectual pursuit.

At the moment I find myself at a crossroad. With a book project to advance and three conference presentations to write, I find myself more than adequately committed up through the end of spring. Yet, I just submitted my memoir to a press, have a novel--actually two--that are demanding equal time, and an opportunity to co-author a screenplay based on my upcoming book (January unveiling) on a basketball team duirng the World War Two years.I've also got friends at the local church wondering when I will finish the much promised Christmas play.

In a way unimaginable a few years ago, all my work seems to be coalescing into one giant pool of ideas and information that makes writing "just scholarship" or "just fiction" seem limiting. I've reached a point where I am neither just a scholar or fiction writer but someone whose intellectual pursuits transcends boundaries. Now, before anyone gets the wrong idea, I do believe there are boundaries that keep scholarship for the most part on one side and literature on the other, though I have written in this blog of the applicability of the same writing skills for both.

I've concluded that what I really want to do with the rest of my life is to tell stories, engage ideas and create characters that reflect life, and do it through different mediums. So, I want to finish the biography on Octavio Romano, co-author the screenplay on the basketball players, write novels on complicated themes, and possibly seasonal plays, a book of psalms, finish the Christmas play and a book of sermons. The last idea comes from having read, many years ago, a book of sermons by Peter Marshall who once served as Chaplain of the Senate. How I will actually justify the latter is still uncertain, though I could simply titled it "Sermons I Gave or Should Have as a Mormon Bishop". It would go well with the idea I had a few years earlier to write a book of lectures and titled it "Harvard Lectures that I Never Gave at Harvard".

The goal is not to experiment or become an intellectual bohemian of sorts but rather to find the avenues, venues, and mediums with which to get all those ideas in my head out into the public square. The last thing I want do is start over. It would go contrary to the idea of becoming a mature scholar and intellectual that I yearn to be. I want to build on what I've done and to maintain the particular style that I've constructed over my life but to apply it to different forms of writing. It will mean learning new techniques and engaging in unchartered waters--for me--but it will not mean leaving behind who I am or what I have been.

 I have done some of this in the past, but I have not embraced it a way that defines who I am not only to myself but to others. I've simply been the scholar who occasionally writes nonacademic work, dabbles in fiction here and there and possibly full time when he retires. Instead I want to be the person who writes all kinds of literature, crossing boundaries, coalescing styles and formats but respecting those principles that maintain the differences between fiction and nonfiction. I want to construct a larger narrative that provides my view of the world, and endorses my values but in the messy, complicated and nonlinear way that is life.  

It is the last frontier (final?) for a man who has been truly blessed by a writing and academic career but who at times has been restricted by his adherence to rules and the playing of "appropriate roles". Now, I believe in rules and even appropriate roles but I believe that people earn the right to transcend and even expand them. I think I have waited long enough to do both. So let's see where this takes me.

Boxing Ourselves In With Our Own Ideas

A couple of days ago I was talking on the phone with a dear friend, a well-known scholar that is facing some medical problems. As always, we engaged in a free-ranging discussion about books, documentaries and politics. Somewhere about the end we got into a heated exchange over young scholars, filmmakers and activists who, according to him, don't have any real sense of the problems this nations faces. It reminded me of other such rantings by others--including myself--about how the "new generation" doesn't get it. Then it came to me that no "new" generation ever gets it, especially when they are new on the scene. The reality is that "getting it" comes with time and experience, and usually when the new generation has had time to go through its own trial by fire moment. Also, their experiences while similar are never exactly the same. Some issues and circumstances may repeat themselves but they never do so in the exact manner so their responses are likely to be different than ours were in another era.

What started this sometimes angry exchange was his charge that another, much younger, friend of mine had produced a documentary that "offered nothing new" and was reflecting a leaderless and unimaginative generation. Knowing the circumstances under which the documentary was made, I well understood the reasons for the direction taken. I also understood that my younger friend saw things differently than both my older colleague or I did because his life experiences have been different and he is still finding his way. I understood this and enjoyed the film while my colleague did not and disliked the it.

The disagreement, however, made me think about how often we are boxed in by our ideologies and our experiences which are often a reflection of trying to live out our political, religious or philosophical views. It can often be an unending cycle that begins with some experiences that lead us to think in a particular way which then leads us to act in a particular way which then leads to re-affirm what we believe and the cycle keeps going ever faster and often in shorter loops. Before we know it we are boxed in and while we might want to see things differently we often default to our ever present views when we are forced to react or when we engage in a discussion as did my friend and I.

A wonderful human being and an excellent scholar, my friend has lived his "ideals" for so long that he sees everything from that angle and as it happens to us old people, we become less patient with those that are different. Worse, when our world view becomes extremely unpopular or doesn't even get into the kitchen table anymore, we double down and seem to pin a badge of courage on ourselves for being different. Now, I believe that there are things worth believing in no matter what others think, but my sense is that politics and rigid ideologies are rarely ever worth sacrilizing, mainly because they are men-made and often begin in particular times and spaces that do not necessarily represent the totality of life experiences. The main ideas can remain relevant but their details and original application rarely do. And those details and applications are usually the ones that make us irrelevant to the larger conversations as they have my dear colleague whose early work was outstanding but whose current and future works go further and further out on a limb and which, unfortunately, seem to be disproven almost as soon as they are published. The catastrophic financial collapse of 2012 never came, neither did the election of a leftist president in Mexico, nor the massive popular uprising or a host of other predictions.

The tragedy is that as a fine scholars he understood the problems, provided great evidence of their impact on world economies and even offered some good solutions, but his need to see dynamic affirmation of his ideas clouded his conclusions, and so his last two books may well be outdated before they ever make it past their first half decade. Worse, the more they become outdated the more he doubles down and the angrier he gets, slipping into the role of angry polemicists and out of being the scholar that he was. The more he sees the self-created walls creep closer and closer the more he defends his shrinking intellectual space.

This is a phenomenon that occurs to very bright people who take their words and writings as gospel. Because they frame them in such high rhetoric and affirm them so vehemently they find themselves in a quagmire with two choices--embarrasingly admit you were wrong or argue against all evidence that you are right. Both choices have consequences though the first one can still bring redemption while the latter usually means ridicule and ending up in the disposable binge of history with other individuals who were wrong but never admitted it.

How do we end up there? Part of it is arrogance, but the other bigger part is our constructing a world view that is dependent on simply expanding that which we already know. A good example is historians who write about say the factory floor in American society. The historians that get boxed in are the ones that get caught up in only writing about the machinery and daily function of the shop floor and not on the greater meanings of both. While this is important and surely too many scholars don't get into the details, it has an intellectual ceiling and eventually the work loses any sense of originality or even relevance. There are areas which are simply overworked and minutea becomes the prominent feature of further study, and to continue to do it is to box ourselves intellectually.

Also, when ideology in our writing becomes primal and we see people only through that lense--which often means we ignore those who don't follow our ideological trajectory--we end up with conclusions that are rarely applicable to what is actually going on. I don't mean to say that ideology is not important or that it cannot explain much of what happens in the lives of people, only that even ideology has to be fluid and understand that people don't function in a linear fashion or even in a logical one. Our writing should be based partly on a "scholarship or intellect of the flesh" which causes us to continually evaluate how things actually play out in real life.

In no way does this mean that we have to be relativists or individuals without a firm foundation of belief.  Rather it means we retain a desire to continue to grow, learn, and experience and a willingness to admit that sometimes we are wrong and we have to change our analysis or our conclusions. To say, "I don't give a damn what others think" or to think that everyone is wrong except us is to close our minds to the essence of the intellectual pursuit or even to our efforts to do good with our scholarship. It means we have boxed ourselves in with those ideals that were once meant to make us more knowledgeable and better intellectuals.

Biography: Complicated Writing Founded on Simplicity

As a scholar and a writer I find that writing about life, whether in scholarly or fictional terms, is all about understanding how to interpret people's simplicity, which is often overlooked when we obsess over their "complications" and focus on finding ways to explain nuances in their lives. For centuries we've tried to established theories, methodologies and even ideological frameworks to try to explain why people act the way they do. We have often sought to identify the powerful forces that whirl around them and then attempt to "explain" how these affect their daily actions. For the most part we have done a credible job in explaining things to a particular generation but given each generation's idyosincracies the explanations usually changes even if only by small increments.

As I tackle my second biography I'm reminded that each individual's life is both unique to them and generally similar to those around them. But I also realize that ideology, theory and some forms of methodology often complicate the story-telliing and even more so the analysis. This is obvious since people normally don't live their lives in a scripted way no matter their ideology, personal beliefs or religious dogma. Their lives are more complex simply because life is both simple and complicated and much of our actions are nuance only because we find no easy answers for the daily challenges that call for multiple responses.

Because our characters interact with other individuals their lives are complicated not only by the reactions of those individuals but also their reaction to those reactions.While the people who make it to the biographical stage are usually more dominant and assertive and seem to get what they want more often than the usual person in the crowd, they often do so not because they get their "way" but because they find a "way" to get what they want.

What I find so interesting about how these people live their lives is that they are both particularly sensitive to things around them and often insulated from them. They seem to have the ability to store things in their souls, to prioritize based on internal values rather than ideology or dogma, and more importantly, they seem inmune to or at least tolerant of pressures that others cave in to. They also find their "calling" or arrive at that critical moment of change in their lives at unexpected times.

We sometimes assume, that character development is easier in fiction because the author decides the time and place, and the personal traits. Yet, any good fiction writer will tell you that sometimes characters take a life of their own, push back against our wishes, and eventually find ways to force a compromise that is not always fully to our liking. I remember a minor character intruding and taking over large parts of a novel I wrote.

Writing a biography like writing a novel is fraud with messy side stories, unforseen intricasies, unresolvable questions, and personal flaws that entangle the plot and at the same time provide the much needed nuance to make the life we depict interesting and instructive. Sometimes this really complicates the message we thought we wanted to promote when we started writing, and if we are honest with ourselves--and hopefully our readers--we end with another "story" or biographical narrative.

Embracing complication is important but so is understanding that simplicity runs through every snarled lifestory. In fact, simplicity is the core of every story no matter how complex it may seem. We all have fundamental concepts of life and while we engage in twists and turns, and are tossed to & fro by the waves of daily living, we tend to default to those core ideals. All of us have values and they usually are the ones that simplify our desires even if they might complicate our lives when we execute them. This makes it imperative that we find the "simplicity" of someone's life and create a core understanding before we start adding the complexities that come with a lived experience.

The simplicity together with the complexities is what creates the nuance because nuance is neither "and/or" but the "maybe," the one thing that is not clear, which is not explainable altogether by looking at the past, the relationships or even the aspirations. People sometimes act against their own selves  and sometimes they show flashes of charity or malevolency that seem out of character. At other times, they show an adventurous spirit or a cautious heart that is uncharacteristic of those traits we have assigned to them.

What are we to do with this? Some scholars discard these traits so as to keep their "narrative" clean. Others make too much of them and create disjointed portrayals, and of course, some build whole new narratives from them. Nuance, however, is not really the dominant trait of anyone, it is simply the little thing that makes them unique within the whole. Someone can still be "representative" and we can still "learn" things about a larger group by studying these people, but they serve to remind us that no matter the similarities and the representative nature of some people, they are still human beings and have particular wants and dislikes, some which make them different from or similar to others. These pecularities are important to note because they provide cautionary signs that we should constantly juggle the collective as well as the individual idyosincracies of a person's life in writing biography or in writing fictional characters. Yet, we need to remember that at the core most people have simple aspirations that often get encumbered by the experiences of everyday life. 

Understanding these will allow us to make sense of all the layers of complication that people acquire in a lifetime, and to better understand the person. It will also reveal in which way they are representatve of and peculiar to what surrounds them.

Some Basics for Intellectual Maturity

Intellectual maturity, however, is not just a product of reading and contemplation. It is the endresult of an examined, engaged and well-lived life. All the education and experience in the world cannot change the character of a person if that person chooses to behave in an inmature way, or to shun those principles that make someone serious, retrospective and wise. Consequently, as we strive to be intellectually mature we engage in bringing a sense of order to our lives, learning respect for others and gaining an ability to think before we speak.

If knowledge accummulation was all that it took then most old scholars, writers and activists would be mature intellectuals, but they are not. Some people I respect as scholars and writers do not measure up simply because they are more concern about what some literary scholars call "performance"or about their politics then they are about imparting wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge encapsulated within temperance, a bit of long suffering, and an eye toward contributing something that lasts beyond the season. That is why there are so few truly mature intellectuals in our academy and our public life.

But there are some, and they have an influence beyond what they might imagine. Not all of them get everything right, and in today's critical world we can find much fault in their work and thoughts. Being intellectually mature doesn't mean that you are perfect or that you stay up with all the cultural changes, only that what you say is based on solid principles that neither vacillate or are given to enhancing a personal reputation.  Some may seem rigid but in fact are not because they understand that they don't know everything, but they are firm because they realize that without firm opinions and recognizeable positions debate and intelletual negotiation is impossible.

Intellectual maturity is also not bond by particular cultural parameters. It is easy to see the mature intellectual as some kind of Einstein or Neibhur--notice the absence of women here--but there are others who do not fit the image but are so in their particular ways. What makes them mature intellectuals is that after a life of accummulating knowledge and engaging actively in their fields, and after a sizeable body of work, they then retreat to reappear only when they have something important to say or write.

Intellectual maturity is also not the domain of the academy or journalism or even the sciences. We tend to get many of them from those disciplines but that is only because we recognize them more easily. The first mature intellectual I met was na old fellow that lived next door to our home. In the afternoons he would gather the barrio kids and tell them stories about the Mexican Revolution, la Llorona, about science and anything that a barrio kid would be interested in. I'm sure that he got some things wrong, at least in the details, but he taught those of us who paid careful attention that there was knowledge to accummulate and worlds to explore.

He was a sober man who read much, said a lot less than he had to, and listened, even to us rowdy kids. Another non-academician, non-elite was Sister Zacharias, a sunday school teacher in a small church that I attended. It was hard to sit through a lesson of hers--she mostly taught adults but I would sneak in occasionally--and not be moved by her spiritual insights, her scriptural knowledge and by the conviction that we could trust every word that came from her mouth. As someone who reads much about religion and doctrine I know that she did not get everything right, but she motivated us to search the divine and to trust.

Trust is a fundamental characteristic of a mature intellectual. You trust them to say only those things they really believe are true, and only after they have been tested it through intense study and action.

After many years of engaging in the intellectual pursuit I realize that intellectual maturity may come with age and experience--though there are young mature intellectuals--but it does not come as a logical sequence. The world itself does not prepare or train us to be intellectually mature. And true intellectual maturity is not found within a moment or a season but is something that lasts for the person's remaining years.

When I think about it that way I realize how far I am from achieving that state of mind. So, for the moment I simply write about it while I admire those who are--from a distance, lest they discover my intellectual inmaturity.

Intellectual Maturity

I have been swamped since I came back to Utah and have written little. Add a bit of spousal illness and it has been hard to think of anything to write. I don't think I have that much to say today but felt the need to continue to communicate. There are so many things I want to say and so I want to be careful not to sound like the street corner preacher who emphasizes the obvious and garbles the details. After all, this blog is partly about communicating and writing, and another part about making sense.

What has been on my mind in recent weeks is change, and the ability to deal with it whether it comes at the dawning of our intellectual lives or at the sunset. Change is not new but it seems to come faster and in more varied ways today with technology. Everyone has a say and there are many good ideas and presumptions out there as well as many others that dressed themselves as such. For a person that wants to keep in touch with what goes on around him/her the overload can easily destroy a line of thought. And when you get old that can be rather inhibiting and destabilizing. It also makes it hard to be a mature intellectual.

Maturity requires profound thinking and the ability to focus on specific thoughts and actions. It is difficult to do so today. I now understand why Thoreau took "time out" to live by himself and why Emily Dickens stayed in her room most of her life. I love the woods but would never live there alone and while I love my home the four walls eventually become smaller and suffocating. Yet, finding my space and my time are more important today than ever.

I was better at it when I was simply a freelance writer and got up to write and went to sleep after writing. Only in those moments when I went out to make a few bucks did I interrupt that part of my thoughtful life.

Becoming a professor changed all of that because I did not believe in "carving my space" at a time that I was mentoring students, giving interviews to the media, or conducting research for my books. I became a public person while being a deeply private one. As much as I enjoy gatherings with friends and engaging in intellectual discussions, I still often find myself alone in a crowd because that is where I feel the most confident.

I believe that as we mature intellecutally we need to get a bit more introspective and to be more profound in our analysis and our work. Accummulating knowledge is important but it is not the same as digesting it. We can go on expanding side ways and even upward but much of that will "tip over" if we don't ground ourselves more deeply in the soil of knowledge and wisdom.

Rather than sharpening our intellectual tools to continue to compete with newer scholars who graduate with an abundance of theories and technological skills, we need to better assess what we know and find ways to articulate it in more meaningful ways. Our competitive years are over and it is time to create a secure place for our work. This is important even if by stepping away from the hustle and bustle of academia, we are perceived as a bit oudated and are accused of "not getting it" or of "not staying current". I think there is something to the criticism but I also believe that much of it has to do with the competitive nature of the intellectual pursuit.

No one that keeps trying to stay "current" ever writes work that will stand the test of time because every discipline and genre requires time to master, and in the quasi-interdisciplinary academic or intellectual world in which we live, we end up mastering nothing because we cannot focus on anything for too long. In a period of time when information, data and analyses continue to pour into our heads, it is hard to truly known anything but the most superficial. So we expand sideways but set down very little intellectual roots. That may be okay and even natural for young scholars, writers and intellectuals. Accummulation while young is important for maturity in our latter years but it can evenutally be detrimental to the thought process. I don't mean we should stop learning or acquiring news skills, only that we shift our focus to making better and more profound sense of what we know and have learned already.

Having challenging jobs and developing difficult research questions is of great value while young, but there is a time to consolidate, evaluate and then share. While we are suppose to do that for all of our work, there is something about time and experience that can provide us with important insights.

Recently, I was reminded of a friend I had at a university. He was a living library of his community's history and had been an important actor within that past. But by the time I met him, he sat on the steps outside of his office and smoke hundreds of cigarrettes sharing with anyone who listened stories of his past. I encouraged him to write and to try to make sense of all that he learned and experienced, but he could not get away from longing "to be active". Eventually his importance faded and the university cast him out like it did its shreded documents. They may have done that anyway but he would have at least taken with him something more than a black lung.

I also met another fellow who kept accummulating books, documents and all the material culture he could. But he never wrote, rarely shared what he was learning with anyone, and he was so difficult to associate with that he left almost no legacy, no new way of thinking, and no body of work that could be poured over to learn something more than the obvious in our field.

It is also important for young scholars and intellectuals to know that being smarter, better trained and more passionate does not yet make them truly great scholars or intellectuals. That takes time and it takes going through all the phases necessary to get to a point in which things that come out of your mouth or your computer have been weighed, tested, and refined over time. Of course, being old and having done something for many years guarantees little except social security and medicare.

At this stage of my life I see my work as only beginning to scratch the surface in terms of depth and profoundness. Part of the reason is that I have spent too much time learning a profession to which I came late, and trying to overcome a sense of inferiority for not having gone to a more prestigious school and not having the type of mentors considered masters in their fields. So, sometimes l've belabored my intellectual work, and given that I prize all the opportunities I get, I tend to "stay" too long and thus slow my maturing. The fact that I feel twenty years younger than I am, I sometimes trick myself. But then I feel the aches and pains of the physical self and those of the intellectual one and I am reminded that I must move on.

For this reason, I will be droppping much of what I do now at the end of this academic year and dedicate myself to seeking deeper knowledge and learning to be more profound in my intellect. This means I will eventually drop this blog, stop presenting in some conferences and doing lectures for pay that often come my way. I don't plan to get "old" too soon, and there is, in my view, still a long and exciting road yet to travel, but I do hope to mature intellectually and otherwise before I start looking twenty years older than I am. I may never get there but at least my carcass on the road to intellectual wisdom might get me some sympathy.

Some thoughts on a New Semester in the Academy

The end of summer is the beginning of a new year for most of us who work in the academy. It seems that it takes us at least the three months of summer to get over what we experienced in the first five months of the year, which often carried some of the lingering effects of the previous fall semester.

Still, it is wonderful to prepare for a new semester and hope that the students will continue to be a reason why one teaches at a university. For returning students, there is always the hope that this year's professors--or adjuncts--will be as good or better than the last semester. There is much hope and if the year is good it lasts the whole academic year. If it is not, you can wait for the next semester, and if that is bad, then you are up the proverbial "creek without a paddle".

Nonetheless, the American university--and that is the only one I know--is a place where one can learn much and experience even more. If we just confine ourselves to our classes--whether teaching or being taught--we lose out. Even as universities change and become more of "job trainers" there is still much that can be learned and experienced in those acres of buildings, labs and athletic fields. We make a mistake when we only go there to do what we came to do, if that "to do" is confined to get training for a job or to get our paycheck.

Too many students today are utilitarian and they miss the value of an education. The obsession on getting a job after the degree is killing this country's intellect. I understand that "enjoying learning for the sake of learning" can be seen as elitist, a possibility only for those who have money or a family job waiting on the outside. And in some ways it is, but precisely because it is makes it valuable. Those who take time to learn are those who learn better. Those who are stressed are those who learn less and rarely ever make the connections to all that learning provides including a good job.

It is an unfair reality for those students who have to work long hours in order to go to school. And the mounting financial burden of college is killing a lot of learning, but as students and teachers we cannot let that reality dominate our experiences. Learning is important and we must find a way to impart it--as teachers--and to get it as students. With few exceptions most poor students still have a few hours to spend walking around their campuses to see the exhibits and museums, to listen to lectures, to read a new book in the library, etc. And every faculty member, no matter how many tests and papers they have to grade, has a few hours to mentor, converse and motivate a student or two.

We need to maintain our vitality and our love for learning. Sometimes the university can be a terrible place if you feel isolated and out of place. Yet, we need to empower ourselves with all that it can offer so that we can validate our own existence within it. No place has a many resources and presents as many possibilities as a college or university. But we often not take advantage because of so many of the issues that surround it. I have had colleagues who "run away" from the university as soon as their classes are gone, and it makes me wonder what they think they bring or take to the institution or their students.

I feel an urgent need to remind people of why they come to the university. Maybe I feel this way because having to be there for my partially disabled wife doesn't allow me all the time that I want to spend at the university.

Ironically, I write this knowing that I will leave the university before retirement age to pursue other interests. Still, I have been around universities in some capacity for the last 28 years and it has been, for the most part, a great experience. Even if a significant part of that time has been spent battling administrators, insensitive policies, a lack of diversity, and an engrained condescension toward working class communities that often surround these ivory towers. Still, the university is one of humanity's greatest inventions and we need to act as if we understand this. And as the activists of the Plan de Santa Barbara said decades ago, "we are here to make the university work for us". That should be our attitude, but it shouldn't keep us from taking in what it has to offer.
                       

Teaching Requires Training and Experience

This week I was talking to my department chair about a course I will be teaching this fall that has few students enrolled currently. In thinking about a change of focus to try to get more students interested I commented that I put a lot of emphasis on writing in this course, to which he quickly responded, "we all do". I was taken back as it sounded a bit defensive. My intent was not to imply that I did more than others, I simply meant to say that I could incorporate other topics because the point of the course was to get students to write a major final essay in history.

A few hours later, feeling a bit ornery, I quietly said to myself, "yes, but not all of us write, and some of 'us' taken twenty years to write a book". After some serious repenting, I thought more about his comment and concluded that we often assume we know what we are doing because we are teaching it(BTW this is not the case with my dept. chair). From my earliest days in the department I struggled with people teaching courses that required a "publishable essay" when they were not publishing at all themselves.

Anyone in academia knows that we are often called to do things we are not trained or even qualified to do. The joke amongst us is that we are okay as long as we stay two weeks ahead of the students in the readings. As scholars we are suppose to know enough about methodology and historical construction to be able to teach a number of lower level courses outside our immediate fields. Once we get beyond that level we are out of our league. So why is it that we can all teach writing and research if we don't do it ourselves?

I know there a few people who can--let's be clear about that--but for the most part those who do not write are rarely qualified to teach it. Some professor out there is probably thinking, " I teach six course a semester, have committee duty, office hours, etc., and you expect me to write". The answer is yes. I don't mean publish major research findings in the top academic or literary journals, but do write. Writing is a skill and when you do it right and do it often you become aware of the intricasies of the written word, and come to understand the pitfalls of trying to put a point across.

 But there is another point I want to make. We also have to be qualified to teach anything and qualification usually comes with training and with practice. There are instances where experience trumps education. I have a friend who was a top Chicano writer a decade ago. He began writing while he was a brick layer. He was a prolific writer and got himself published in small Chicano literary journals and then began publishing in small presses. He became so popular--and several dissertations were written on his work--that he got a job at a community college teaching writing and Spanish. Then a few years later, he was hired as a "humanist" at the University of Arizona. At the time and until he retired he had no college degree much less an advance degree in literature.

But he was far from uneducated. He read profusely, getting everything he could find on writing, literature, philosophy, the Spanish language, folklore, culture, and the list goes on. He also use to frequent a small store that sold sandwiches and engage in intellectual debates and discussion with college professors who also hung out there. This is where he made the impressions that got him his academic appointments.

But recently, I read about a long-since retired faculty member who did not get tenure because she had no advanced degree. Her claim to expertise in her field was that she spent a lot of time in the community organzing and since she was teaching about the people she organized, she felt qualified to receive tenure. Those who know me know that I'm all for the barrio people telling their own story and that I tend to be critical of people stuck in the ivory tower who know little about the people they write about. Still, my thought was that having been warned to get more training she was rightfully dismissed for not attempting to do so.

Why supportive in one case and not the other? Did I think that an experienced male without a degree is better than a female with organizing experience and at least a bachelor's degree? Not at all. He was experienced directly in what he was teaching, and he had shown his abilities to publish, and had done so more often than some of those who became his colleagues. He was also a fiction writer which often calls for a different kind of research and different style of preparation. Despite the proliferation of writing programs, most good writers learn by writing and experiencing life, not through academic training or degrees.

The other person was engaged in teaching sociology, history, literature, etc without any advanced training in any of these, and her writings were mostly pamphlets that spoke to the needs of the barrio. I admire the latter, and still admire her work in developing women's studies, but she lacked training in methodology, theory, research fundamentals, and she was not doing research to further the field. Worse, she saw no need to continue her training. Her initial value should not have been questioned but no one can stand still and expect to remain relevant, especially a teacher.

To be able to teach one has to be trained--and in exceptional cases train themselves--and one has to have experience doing what one teaches. How to get the traininng is obvious. But how does one "experience" history, sociology or literature? You do so by researching, presenting and writing; by becoming involved in knowing the subject on the ground. How do we experience civil war history, Greek military campaigns, Islamic medicine? We research, go to museums, visit historical spots, handle the instruments (or guns), go to re-enactments, and write about the topic as much and as often as we can. Academic training usually requires some of that but often not enough. We usually depend on the person to do it because of their passion for the subject. Unfortunately, some people go into the academy because it is a "cushier" job and surely more interesting than say accounting. Even worse, there are some people who begin with  passion but lose it and then simply regurgitate what they learned years before.

I have great respect for what happens in the academy. There are fewer more exciting places and what we do there has a lot of impact, much of it positive, on the larger society; but we need to do a better job of training people and have higher expectations of them as teachers. Every future professor should be allowed to teach while in graduate training, and we should have courses that specifically train a scholar to teach. We should not hire people to teach unles they've had internships and temporary slots in which they've taught. And we should expect all of these people to bring a writing portfolio even if not all the work within it is published.

The reality is that most academic departments do a terrible job of training their young scholars to teach, and an even worse job of helping them to publish. Since so many tenured professor were never taught to teach and/or write they are often afraid to show their deficiencies to their younger colleagues, or they think everyone ought to do it on their own just as they did. This attitude does no favors to the students or our young colleagues.

And things may get worse if we continue to replace full time facutly with adjuncts who have neither the resources or the time to "perform their disciplines" or to write about them. We are guaranteeing that our students will learn less even as they pay more.

A final thought: I have never believed that student evaluations really measure the worth or the abilities of a teacher. Yet, so many universities are going toward that method to evaluate their faculty. What they do is not really empower their students to demand a better education but simply provide administrators more control over the classroom since they can use--and often do--these evaluations as swords over a faculty member's head. Teaching is more than pleasing students, or running a "tight ship" in the classroom. It is about imparting knowledge, getting students to enter unknown and sometimes uncomfortable circumstances, and it is about equipping them with the skills and knowledge to empower themselves. Sometimes you do all of that and they still hate you.

As one former colleague loved to say, students often don't know enough to contribute to their education, and it is incumbent upon us to teach them. But we can't unless we are trained and experienced.

A "Discussion on Race": Another Naive Suggestion for Progress

The "Call" by some for a discussion on race in this country since Obama was elected and particularly after the Trayvon Martin verdict seems to me a bit naive. After all, what is it that whites--the ones who are suppose to learn from this discussion--not know about racism in American society? They know we once enslaved black people and then developed Jim Crow after they were freed; that we took the Southwest from Mexico because we saw them as unfit to occupy the land; that we interned Japanese Ameicans because of xenophobia and in order to take away their property, and that profiling is something that policemen do all the time. Conservative politicians know all of this and they still block any kind of civil rights legislation that comes their way, and they promote voter IDs to limit minority voting and most of their "budget cuts" come on the backs of people of color.

Do those advocates for a "discussion on race" really think that the people at the Weekly Standard, Fox News, or that Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck are really going to change their views about people of color? Do they believe that those who fear Latinos taking their job are going to call for the legalization of 11 million of them, or that they will be happy having them sing the national anthemn at sporting events? Do they believe that Republican House members are going to change their voting habits if they "knew" that American society is still a society based on some elements of white supremacy?

In our divided society, there are many on the wrong side of the race issue and a large number of others who remain "neutral" because they fear true equality means losing the advantages that white supremacy provides them even if they do find those advantages distasteful. Talking about it will change few of those.

We don't need a discussion on race. We need jobs, real affirmative action, better housing for the poor, better education--which neither side seems to understand how to get--legalization and a host of other things. People will be treated as equals once they are actually equal in many of the things that society considers important for the exercise of citizenship.

Republicans had their "discussion on race" when it came to Latino voters and so far the only thing it did was to rile up the racists and the Latino-haters in the party to become even more resistant to immigration reform. The party of stupid only became...

Democrats are not blameless given how they made sure that in their version of immigration reform businesses get most of the benefits, future "legal" Latino workers get even less protections than they do now, and the president continues to deport them in record numbers, and break-up families by the hundreds of thousands. When the president asked Senator Schummer to head the immigration reform efforts for Democrats, it became clear to many of us that it would turn out to be a bonus for businesses on the back of workers.

We don't need a discussion on race, what we need is for those who believe in the progress of people of color to work harder, compromise less on fundamental rights, and put forward legislation that will make this country better. If we are going to have a discussion on race let's have it on the senate and house floors, but let it be about legislation that actually makes a difference and not water-down bills that continue to keep people of color as second-class citizens.

And those who proclaim themselves as leaders of our communities need to come up with better ideas and stop simply creating "show" to get themselves on cable news, and get jobs as punditry. Much of the old civil rights establishment has run out of ideas, and while some deserve to be honored for their past accomplishment, as a group they are becoming irrelevant except to get their friends and family jobs. We need leaders with character who are not willing to settle for "the best at the moment". There has not been a single piece of legislation in the last decade that has not been mostly compromised away. We need new rules in the Senate to stop making compromises that protect one party or another when they are in the minority. We need to force senators to actually filibusters instead of threatening to do so. We need the House to have rules that allows pieces of legislation that have a lot of support to be voted on.

 We need to develop a new re-districting plan for congressional districts that do not gerrymander to keep one party in power. And we need to change the way we celebrate American holidays so that they reflect the truth about our history and not venerate mostly one group of people.

In the process of doing all of that we will get our "discussion on race" in America but it will actually mean something and not be just another naive attempt to bring people together who have actually chosen not to come together. I believe in "coming and reasoning together" but I also believe that the process is not more important than making a difference in the lives of people who truly need help. Those who over-emphasize the process believe in a mediocre version of democracy and equality.

Trayvon, Zimmerman and Civil Rights Politics

Let me begin this post by saying that the decision to find George Zimmerman "not guilty" came as no surprise to me. While I did not fixate on the case as some did I did listen to some of the testimony and read up on the case. My first thought was what a terrible job the prosecution did, though I might add that the actual first reaction was what a terrible job in selecting the jury. Second (or third) was why the 2nd degree murder charge. It was going to be difficult to get a conviction without some serious eye-witness and the prosecution had none.

My sense is that if they had charged man slaughter from the beginning they could probably have been able to build a solid case and he would now be facing 30 years in jail. Coming in with the lesser charge at the last minute seemed to reflect to me--and I guess the jury--that the prosecution was desperate and unsure that it had proven its case. Finally, the defense had a game plan and executed it well, while the prosecution only wanted to make it a case about a guy who couldn't keep his story straight and was a "wannabe cop".

All that said, let me say that the case reflects a lot about the stage of American society today. Nowhere did I find an honest appraisal of the case. Fox had Trayvon the aggressor from the beginning, and MSNBC had Zimmerman as a pathological killer simply out looking to murder a black child. It quickly became a black vs white thing rather than the case of a man shooting a teenager in a gun-happy state. Did race play a part in the killing? Of course, so much of what happens in this country has to do in some form or another with race, but not all racial incidents are discrimination cases.

One thing that we can learn from this killing is that we need to make sure we know what fights to pick as civil rights cases. This was not a civil rights case even if it was a black teenager being killed by a "white hispanic" man. Not every confrontation between a person of color and a white person involves the violation of someone's civil rights. What was it that civil libertarians were fighting for: the right for a person to walk down the street without being followed by a neighborhood watch guy? Was it another fight against profiling? The fact is civil rights cases are about the individual and the government or the minority individual and the larger society not about two individuals.

The Trayvon/Zimmerman was about a white man killing a black man. Is that worse than a black man killing a black man as is happening by the hundreds in Chicago and Detroit? Or worse than a latino killing a Latino as it happens too frequently in the major urban areas in the Southwest? A racially-motivated killing--if that is what it was and we don't fully know--is not a civil rights case. Al Sharpton and other black leaders should have understood that. If it was a proven fact that neighborhood watch white guys are killing blacks or minorities indiscriminately across the country and no one is doing anything about it, then you have a case. If minorities are being jailed for using "stand your ground" and whites are not, then you have a case. Civil rights cases are about the systematic treatment of a large group of people and nowhere in the trial deliberations or even in the accompanying analysis was there any discussion that the Martin case involved any such situation.

One could argue that blacks are systematically being mistreated, but what would have been the "civil rights" outcome of a Zimmerman conviction? That black men have the right to walk a street in the rain eating Skittles and drinking Arizona drinks without being killed? They already have that right and 99 of 100 young black men do it every day--though Skittles and Arizona tea may not be their preferred snack--unless they are walking at night in large urban areas like Chicago. Where are the marches to stop that kind of killing? Why is it that killing a black person is only a big issue when he or she is killed by a white person? Is the life of black person only important if you connect it in some way to a white person?

The real civil rights question of today is why people of color have still not been empowered to change their own reality. While there are hundred of groups working at the local level to change attitudes and to empower people, too many national leaders are simply jumping on hot issues instead of doing the work that is necessary to change the status quo. We often forget that many of yesterday's civil/human rights leaders that we honor today were as much about empowering their people to change their lives as they were about changing the laws. They understood that if the laws were changed, things would still not change if people did not empower themselves.

In today's civil rights culture it is too much about what society can do for the person instead of how the person can take advantage of opportunities, or how they can fight against the obstacles still around. Civil rights struggles were never about solving every problem, only about eliminating those dejure ones that did not allow people to empower themselves. Give them the vote, desegregate the schools, end officially-sanctioned police brutality, teach then their history, and recognize them as human beings, etc. That was the goal. It was only partially achieved because the next phase was going to be the hardest, getting people to empower themselves by voting, going to school, taking bad cops to court, reading about their history and accepting themselves as full human beings. In many of our barrios and ghettoes that is still not happening enough.

There is still much to be done about poverty, discrimination, bad schooling, racial teachings, etc. And little of it had to do with this case. Trayvon was not a disadvantaged youth living in the heart of the ghetto with no chances for uplift. Convicting Zimmerman would have given closure to the family, might have called into question the idea of armed neighborhood watch guys, maybe created a groundswell against the gun culture in Florida or even punish a guy for doing the wrong thing, but it would not have done an iota of difference in the civil rights struggle.

The fact is that in the last study done that I know about, blacks were found to be killing whites at a much higher rate than the opposite. That isn't because black people hate whites or they are more violence-proned but rather the result of what most of us already know--poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, discrimination and what is causes: broken families, teenage mothers and fathers, unemployed, angry young men, etc. That is a real civil rights concern and it often gets lost everytime we have a case like this.