Bandits, Elvis, and Other Mystics: An Interview with Paul Vanderwood
- Bandits, Elvis, and Other Mystics:An Interview with Paul Vanderwood
Paul Vanderwood, Professor Emeritus of History at San Diego State University, died in San Diego on October 10, 2011, at the age of 82. A distinguished and innovative historian of modern Mexico, Vanderwood authored or co-authored several books, mostly dealing with the political, social, and cultural history of Mexico between about 1860 and the mid-twentieth century. The four works for which he is best known are Disorder and Progress (1982), The Power of God Against the Guns of Government (1998), Juan Soldado (2004), and Satan's Playground (2010), and they are discussed extensively in this interview.
Having spent the first part of his career as an investigative journalist (a craft that left an indelible mark on his historical writing), Vanderwood earned a Ph.D. in Latin American history at the University of Texas at Austin in 1969; that year he took a teaching appointment at San Diego State University and retired from the same institution in 1994. His books on the Tomochic uprising of the early 1890s and the folk saint Juan Soldado, in particular, reflect his intense interest in the forms of popular religious belief and practice, a subject on which he made memorable and lasting contributions. His work was marked by lively writing, meticulous archival research, imaginative reach, and a great belief in knowing firsthand the cultural area on which he was writing. During his scholarly career he also made important contributions to the study of visual media, especially film and picture postcards, as historical sources. Shortly before his death, Paul Vanderwood received the 2012 Distinguished Service Award of the Conference on Latin American History.
Paul, those of us who know the trajectory of your career and some of your earlier work, before the distinguished books that you have done [End Page 563] on Mexican history, know that you started your career as an investigative journalist. I am wondering if you can tell us how you got into that, and how your interests then took you into the field of Latin American history.
Well, I was one of the lucky ones who very early in life—this would be high school for me—knew what I wanted to do for a career. I knew that I wanted to be a journalist, a newspaper reporter. And even in high school in Ridgewood, New Jersey, I worked on the Ridgewood newspaper reporting sports events at the high school, and sometimes a little feature story. I wasn't paid anything, but it was just a great honor to get published in the high school newspaper. I graduated in 1946, I believe it was, and so I went to a small school in West Virginia called Bethany College. I knew that the school had a good journalism department, and that I could probably become the editor of the newspaper and the editor of the yearbook, and that I could play a much bigger role in newspaper work than I could perhaps at Columbia University, or at Missouri, which had wonderful journalism departments of their own. So I took the view that I needed practice in doing the writing and editing and so forth; that's why I went to that school. And they said they might put me to work on the Pittsburgh newspaper and the Wheeling Intelligencer. I did get to do that for a while, and it was a good grounding for me. When I came out of Bethany College, in 1950, I was drafted almost immediately, and I served three years in the U.S. Army; at one point I was a tank commander. The Chinese were having a great deal of good fortune with their propagandistic efforts, dropping leaflets on guys and that sort of thing, urging them to come over to their side, and they'd give them good housing, and so forth. And a lot of our guys deserted, so the U.S. Army decided we needed to establish a psychological warfare school . . .
Were you actually in Korea?
No. I was ordered to go to Korea, but the order came down for...
