2008 CLAH Luncheon Address: Dos Palabras on Mexican Shrines and Contagiousness of the Sacred

I am touched and surprised by this recognition, from colleagues who don’t know me personally, as well as from friends in the profession who must have written on my behalf. I like Bill Russell’s idea that a good way of leading is to serve. I have looked for ways to serve, but they have mostly been out of public view. In that spirit I want to acknowledge especially John TePaske who died a few weeks ago—a colleague I’ve looked up to from the beginning as a wonderful example of integrity, generosity, and wisdom.

And I’m flattered by the words about my scholarship, but for forty years I’ve put teaching first. It’s honest work, creative work when I’ve been up to it. I feel privileged to have been a teacher of history and Latin America wherever I’ve done it—privileged that there was a place for me in American academia, and especially privileged by the kindness of colleagues and strangers in archives, libraries, and seminar rooms in Latin America and Spain, as well as at home. It has always felt strange to be asked how my “own work” is going, meaning my scholarship. Teaching is the lion’s share of my own work and how I’ve earned a living these years. But it’s also true that while my first teaching job at the high school level was fulfilling, I wanted to inquire and learn through more open-ended research and writing, too.

What I’ve meant to do as a teacher and scholar has been shaped by some small epiphanies and inquietudes. Here are three of them. A youth soccer team from Mexico City touring southern California in 1959 visited my high school to show us what the sport was about. Over lunch, the inevitable conversation of teenage boys shifted in a surprising direction when one young man asked me what I thought about the U.S.-Mexican War. He was curious to know what a contemporary of his from the otro lado thought about something he assumed was as important to me as it was to him. The fact was that I thought nothing about the war and had only the dimmest recollection from a U.S. history textbook of a paragraph about Marines in the halls of Montezuma. I felt my ignorance then, but I also glimpsed a different historical awareness—that events a hundred years old can still be unfinished business and have the urgency of today’s headlines.

Then in college I visited several of the great sixteenth-century monastic church complexes in rural central Mexico with Renato Rosaldo, Sr. This American Gothic in an earthquake belt led to new inquietudes. Who built and maintained those magnificent, durable buildings, how were they used, and why were they located in what seemed like out of the way places? And there were the months, as an aspiring law student fresh out of college, spent learning to read colonial-era land litigation records in the Archivo General de la Nación when it was still located in the presidential palace. Often I shared the big study tables with campesinos and their country lawyers who were poring over the land records of their communities, teaching me that there was life and tragedy in those papers, information that was vital to local well-being, if I would look for it. I was hooked, and wanted to honor these living pasts and share as much as I could of other surprises and paradoxes with fellow Americans who knew as little as I did, if they thought about Latin America at all. There went my parents’ hopes for a lawyer in the family.

My grander goal as a historian in the classroom has been to help students reach beyond personal experience for what it means to be human, to promote a bond between students and the subject by practicing what Inga Clendinnen calls “exact imagining.” We have obligations to those we study and the sources that can be mustered; carefree claims are not...