Life, Luck, and How I Became a Historian
- Life, Luck, and How I Became a Historian
Before I begin, I want to thank the Conference on Latin American History [CLAH] and the Distinguished Service Award Committee for giving me this signal honor. This organization has always been important to me, and it's really nice to know that it thinks I've been important to it.1
The last talk I gave to CLAH was in Atlanta five years ago. I told the story of one man, Santiago de Liniers, and his good and bad fortune. Just as for Liniers, luck has played a huge role in my life.
I have always loved history and the somewhat "exotic." The first book I remember reading, at age 8, was the story of a young Russian dancer who first performed for Tsar Nicholas II and his family and then for the revolutionary workers. I looked up everything I could find about Russia, the Romanovs, and the Revolution, and dreamed of going to Russia and becoming a ballerina. In fourth-grade social studies, I was fascinated by the story of PeeWee, a boy who lived in a longhouse in the Amazon. Two years later I was captivated by a song called "Kiss of Fire" and insisted on memorizing all its passionate lyrics—I found out years later that the song was based on "El Choclo," an Argentine tango. As you can see, my interest in history did not come from a deep theoretical perspective, although I was always awed by those historians who could think of applying the Marxist dialectic to seventeenth-century Honduras, or using Foucault to understand sixteenth-century Brazil. Unlike those scholars, my interest in history sprung from my fascination with people and the stories of their lives. I have always been curious about people's lives, and perhaps because of that, I have had an interesting life myself. [End Page 1]
I became a Latin American historian because of several strokes of luck. The first is that I failed French. I had taken four years of French in high school (the only acceptable language for anyone of my generation), managed to pass the New York State Regents Exam (I'm a wiz at multiple-choice questions), and had been placed in a third-year French class in my freshman year at Barnard College. The college required two foreign languages to graduate and I was planning to use French as my "primary" language and pick up a year of something else along the way to serve as my "secondary language." I thought I was doing superbly well in French when, about two weeks into the semester, the teacher told me that my French was so hopeless that I had to drop the course. As a small gift, Madame allowed me to count French as my second foreign language.
Branded a total failure in my chosen foreign language, and faced with confronting another exotic tongue during my last three years at college, I decided to try Spanish because everyone told me it was "easy." So at the beginning of my sophomore year, I found myself in a Spanish class, not because of any interest, but because I needed to get through three years of torture to make it out of college. My first year of Spanish was almost as bad as French: I seemed to be in permanent combat with irregular verbs, noun gender, and bizarre syntax. Luckily I made it to the second year, where I had the good fortune to have an excellent teacher. I still have a copy of a paper that I wrote in Spanish commenting on several chapters of Don Quixote. Every word in that 20-page paper was circled in red (wrong word, wrong tense, garbled syntax), but at the top was an "A" and the comment "interesting ideas." A light bulb went on—Spanish was not just an amalgam of endless irregular verbs, it could actually be used to express ideas, and my professor thought I had something to say. The summer between my junior and senior years, I decided to study at UNAM to improve my Spanish. On my return to New York after my first trip...
