[00:00:12] Speaker A: Hi, my name is Geraldo Cadava, and I want to thank you for tuning into season three of Writing Latinos, a podcast from Public Books.
We're back for more terrific conversations with Latino authors writing about the wide world of Latinidad.
As always, we aim to provide thoughtful reflections on Latino history, culture, politics, and identity and how writing conveys some of its meanings.
Don't forget to like and subscribe to Writing Latinos wherever you get your podcasts. And now for the show.
Albert Camarillo, whose friends call him Al, is a dean, maybe the dean of the academic field of Latino history.
In more than 40 years of teaching at Stanford, he mentored generations of students who've written books that have taught us much of what we know about the history of Latinos in the United States.
He has a new book himself, a memoir called Compton in My A Life in Pursuit of Racial Equality, published by Stanford University Press.
Compton in My Soul was recently awarded the Gold Medal prize from the Independent Publishers Book Awards in, in the category of Autobiography, Memoir, and the Forward Indies Award in the Multicultural Adult Nonfiction book category.
We wanted to talk with him about growing up in the black and Latino neighborhood of Compton, writing family history, and the importance of building ethnically and racially diverse universities, even when that pursuit is under attack.
First, Al, I just want to thank you so much for taking the time out of your summer day to talk to me.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Well, always. Always good to. To see you, Jerry, and. And to talk with you whenever we get a chance.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Absolutely. So let's get right into it, because the subtitle of your new book, Compton in My Soul, is A Life in Pursuit of Racial Equality. And I. I think that that is a very accurate subtitle for what your life's work has been. And in some ways, your lifelong pursuit of racial equity and social justice in American higher education is under attack right now from the highest levels of American government. But as you demonstrate in your memoir, this is not the first time that diversity in higher ed has been attacked and the first time that those of us who write about histories of race in the United States have had to respond to those attacks. So how do you compare what we're seeing right now with your experiences at Stanford since the 1970s?
[00:02:47] Speaker B: An important question for us right now at this particular moment, as a historian, Right.
We look at change over time, and we can mark those changes in the last 50 to 60 years in higher education with something that had really never been part of higher education curriculum or administration. That is ethnic studies, broadly defined. Right. Or the inclusion of people of Color, students, staff and faculty.
So I think that one, we can see that it's always been a struggle, right? There's always been pushback.
You understand that.
You try to navigate that.
The civil rights movement and the student movements of the 1960s laid a foundation as an opening so that people like me, my generation, really the first generation to enter higher education, and those of us that, that begin a career in higher education as we become aware of what are the, what's the resistance, what are the issues, the pushback. And we understand that, right, because it's historical and we know that the continuity of those historical forces and resistance are real.
But this moment in time is unique in many ways because we have a full frontal assault coming from the White House on down and in concert with states and localities that would like to peel us back to a different time in American society, the 1940s or 1950s, when there was no such thing as diversity, equity and inclusion, There was no such thing as ethnic studies, and there were no such thing as, for the most part, students of color and faculty of color. Right? So this is unprecedented in the ways it's being proposed, implemented, orchestrated from the highest levels of American political power.
And that's why this moment is different. Though the pushback, as I, as I indicated, is part of a long thread of resistance to things that are other than white, Anglo Saxon America.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: One of the things that struck me is how perfectly the beginning and end of your career map on to so many fights over and fights for diversity and racial equity in higher education, like, like the civil rights era, affirmative action, multiculturalism, the rise and fall of DEI. You started at Stanford in the 1970s and retired just a couple years ago. I just want to hear you talk about whether or not you see, and I hope you do not see this recent period as the dismantling of your life's work.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Well, I'm hopeful.
I don't think Disney, despite the assault on everything that you and I and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people consider important in American society, that's changed American society for the better.
That despite the assault on almost every part of this changed society from 50 or 60 years ago, I don't think that it will be successful because we're here to stay.
The attack on the universities, we see it left and right, mostly right, and we see the resistance now of universities saying, you can't interfere with academic freedom.
We've built these institutions in a way that they're going to remain.
So I'm hopeful that whether it be higher education or ethnic studies in the public schools that we will be able to navigate and survive this most recent and most powerful onslaught against everything that ethnic studies and, and social equality, racial justice, what it stands for in the.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: U.S.
yeah, I've been thinking along similar lines. I mean, one of the things I noted in your book, and I don't remember the exact numbers, but when you started at Stanford, you were one of a very small number of faculty members, but even the number of Chicano students who were at Stanford was very small. And I remember you telling me recently, we had a conversation where I think you said that Stanford at this point is a, if it's not majority minority as a student body, it's pretty close to that.
[00:07:42] Speaker B: It hovers around 50% for high 40s.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: Right. And so part of what I've been thinking about is that you, you can't unring that bell. You know, I mean, these are students whose histories.
They want to know the histories of their communities. You know, we live in a diverse America and that's just a fact. So, you know, even if the Trump administration wouldn't want us to teach Latino history or the history of racial difference or whatever, I mean, we just have a much more diverse country, our institutions are much more diverse now than when you started your career. And there's going to be a demand, I mean, I see the demand for Latino history at Northwestern and I'm sure you see it at Stanford too.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: Absolutely. And as you know, Jerry, that, that in the state of California, it's been mandated ethnic studies will begin next year for all California high school students. And it's, it's an important development because it says that all of our children, all of our students in a state like California, arguably the most diverse state in, in the nation, maybe most diverse place in the world, that in order for us to have a democratic society where a diverse population can understand and appreciate and value the differences of so many differences that exist within our population. That ethnic studies, despite all the critique, is fundamentally about teaching us how to live together in a diverse society, in a diverse democratic society. When you boil it down, that's what it's about.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: In the early chapters of Compton in My Soul, you recount the experience of growing up in Compton, which is a black and Latino suburb of Los Angeles. And in your story, black and Latino families live in proximity to one another.
A lot of recent writing, though, has focused on tensions between black and Latino communities and the anti blackness of Latinos. What do you make of this recent turn in the field to highlight tension between the two Communities and anti blackness.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: I think it not only reflects some of the scholarship and writing about black Latino relationships, but it's also so pervasive in the media. What grabs attention? What are the things that are so stark, that seem to be so prevalent that the media hooks on? Well, it's spectacular. It's black gangs against Latino gangs things. It's the tension that exists in neighborhoods. It's the problems that black students are having with Latino students in changing demographic areas of cities across the country. So that's the spectacular.
It deserves to be researched by academics, and I've done some of that myself. But what I know both from personal experience and from digging deeper in a place like Compton is you don't hear the stories about the cooperation, the intermarriage.
We have a term in California, Blaxicon, right. This is a substantial population of people that are marrying and forming relationships and partnerships across those two groups. And we don't hear much about it. So.
And I know that personally, not only as I, as for this book, dug deeper and deeper and wanted interviewing dozens and dozens and dozens of people in Compton over the last, you know, 20, 25 years. But I knew it from personal experience, right? I knew that growing up in a segregated barrio in Compton when it was predominantly white.
But as I was going through primary school and and middle school, the demographics of Compton, at least west Compton, were changing dramatically. So my growing up, my maturation as a student, I got to see not only the segregated Mexican American community, but the interaction with white students.
And by the time I'm in middle school, interaction with the majority black students.
And I saw firsthand and experience personally the ability to get along when you could understand one another and appreciate one another and those friendships can blossom. And as I did the research for this book, more contemporarily, all of those things coexisted with those things that we read about in the Los Angeles Times or son on cnn of the conflict between Latinx folks and black folks, that they coexist, Right?
But that which we hear most frequently is about the conflict.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: And part of what I loved about your book is how that story isn't just about the neighborhood you grew up in, but when you went to ucla, like some of the first relationships you sought out were with other the small number of African American students. And then at Stanford, one of the ways in which you've navigated the institution is by forging relationships with African American professors there too. So it's kind of been a lifelong story as well.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: It wasn't until I was at UCLA as a student and exposed to the first ethnic studies courses that then, of course, light a fire in me to pursue ethnic studies, American history with a focus on Mexican American Latinos, but then comparative race and ethnicity as my career at Stanford unfolds.
It was understanding these things that existed in American society.
And I had the privilege of having experienced it as a young person, but as a college student beginning to understand what were the divisions? What why were the divisions? How did the divisions exist? Why did they exist? And how can you overcome them? And I, in effect, kind of fall. I would fall back on that early Compton experience about attempting to forge those relationships across culture, race, religion. And some of them were not successful, to be honest, but when they were successful, they were beautiful. And so I carried that with me as a part of who I am as a person, but as a faculty member, as an educator at Stanford and beyond.
[00:14:38] Speaker A: I really loved personally learning about your family, because with you, as one of the kind of most important founders of our field, I've always thought of you as the kind of head of a family with kind of academic children like George Sanchez and Dave Gutierrez and, you know, Stephen Pitti, my own advisor, and Lori Flores, a friend from Yale. So, you know, I've thought of you as the head of a family. But it was really neat to get to learn about your ancestors who'd lived in Compton for, you know, a hundred years at least. And I'd love to hear what your experience was of writing family history. You know, you sell. You tell such a richly textured story about your family's roots in Southern California from the late 19th century forward. And how did you do this research?
[00:15:31] Speaker B: Were you.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: Well, one. One thing you said you were just doing is conducting interviews over the course of 25 years. But were you also poring through archives? Is there such a thing as the Camarillo family archive? Did you use ancestry.com or were you really relying on stories you were told as a kid that you then had to confirm now, as a historian? So these are some of the things I'm curious about your process of writing family history.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: I had to use every skill as a historian to dig wherever you can, right? To unearth stories, to go to newspaper, the typical things that historians do. So the more traditional sources, but for the Latino experience, and it's the Chicano or Mexican American experience, those archives, not until much more recently, were. Were they available. So my quest, I think, to dig deep into the. The Compton experience goes back to family. Interestingly, though, which is true of a lot of families. Not until I was a student at UCLA and until I started to get interested in Mexican American Chicano studies and started to ask the questions about stories. Having elders tell stories, for example, that I may have heard a little bit about. But not until you're adult do the family elders tell you the detail about these things. Right? So. But when I was equipped to ask the right questions and for the elders to know that I was really sincere to know about their past. Because no one had ever asked before. Right? No one had really asked before. And so I started out with my first graduate. You'll appreciate my first graduate student paper was on the history of the barrio in Compton. And so I used those budding historical skills of research together with oral histories to lay a foundation for understanding the past. Right. And, and talking with my mother, talking with my father, talking with the Theos and the Tias and. And aunts and uncles and others that would want to share their stories with me. And for the, for the Compton p. The more contemporary Compton piece, I. I continue to do that.
You mentioned, by the way, Ancestry. Ancestry.com provides you a lot of access to materials that you otherwise wouldn't know. For example, all of the Mexican birth and baptism and burial records which I had not had access to prior to. So that allowed me to do some work about the family in Mexico. Right. But. But I again, even for. For the, for the book, I relied on oral testimony, oral histories that, that historians use, every possible primary source that historians again, typically use census material, the few archives that. That have. That had material about Compton, the newspapers, whatever I could get my hands on, to put together as many sources as I could to tell. Tell the stories.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: Do you feel like you learned anything that was surprising or new about your family? Or do you understand your family history, your family's experience, and any kind of different way than you did before you set out to write the book?
[00:19:00] Speaker B: It allowed me to reflect more on, for example, what my father went through as a 10 year old. His father abandoned the family, at least temporarily in Mexico during the revolution. And he pleads with his uncle to take him to find his father because he know the. My. My Theo Trino, my. My. My great uncle had gone with. With my grandfather, my dad's father, to Compton and was working on a farm in Compton. And so to understand and reflect on the amount of trauma that my father had to experience.
You know, a kid that never stepped foot in a classroom and that migration process of family dissolution, of all the issues that he had to contend with, and that was Part of over a million people that made that migration between 1910 and 1930. He was part of that.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: So, yeah, it allowed me to reflect and with deeper, I think, deeper reflections about the family as they retold stories to me, some of the really difficult stories that, you know, brought tears to my eyes as they were recounted by my elder siblings about, for example, the third child in the family, second child in the family, a sister who died before I was born, being refused service at, it turned out, a segregated white hospital, which was the closest in Compton because they couldn't pay the fee. In other words, it was a segregated hospital that didn't take Mexicans and she died as a result. Right. So those stories that enrich, they hurt the soul, but they enrich the narrative because they tell you about people's experiences, trauma, and then all the other things about the happiness, right? The happiness of the family, somehow it survives, it persists, it navigates all the difficulties. And for me, as the youngest of, of six, I was, I benefited tremendously from that. And that was also part of the reflection.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: Can you kind of represent some of the responses that you've gotten from family members who've read the book?
[00:21:11] Speaker B: It's been an interesting response because they love the stories, right?
And the stories that they had talked about and remembered and heard from elders are now public information.
First of all, I should say the motivation to write this book was both personal, right? Because I wanted grandchildren as they growing up, as they're growing up in a very different experience, very with. With a privileged experience for them to hear from their quote, unquote, papa and, and for them to, to read these stories, right?
But I was hoping too that it might resonate with a younger generation of Americans of all races, right? But especially the Latino kids growing up who form them, the substantial majority of students in California schools these days that they might identify in some way. And one of the interesting responses, Jerry, was that I've, as I go to these high and talk with these students, how much they read into the stories about my family a long time ago, right. Growing up in Compton and how it resonates with them today, as most of them, the children, American born, children of immigrants. So that immigrant experience is intergenerational, obviously. Right?
And then, you know, I've heard from a lot of other people, again, not just Latinos, but others, African American folks, white folks, who, who had been it, who had lived in Compton, some who had gone to school with me, and how much they appreciated the storytelling, right. Of. Of Compton and, and exposing the bad things, but as well as some of the good things. Right. And, and so it's been a. It's been a heartwarming experience to, to hear people talk about the book.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Writing Latinos is brought to you by Public Books, an online magazine of ideas, arts and scholarship. You can find
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Maybe we should issue a warning to our listeners that they can tune out if we're going to bore them to death by talking about academia. But damn it, I'm. I'm going to take the opportunity to talk to someone who has been studying Latino history professionally as a job for as long as anyone else alive, probably. And I want to take that opportunity to ask about, you know, how the field has changed over the course of your career. You know, so, so just first, what was the state of the field when you started your career and where is it today? I know that this is a huge question, but maybe you have a few takeaways about how the field has evolved.
[00:24:14] Speaker B: As a young student at UCLA. So I started UCLA pre affirmative action in 1966.
So there were almost no students of color at that institution with almost 28,000 students, 50 Mexican Americans approximately when I started, about 100 black students, maybe 100, maybe 200 Asian American students.
No such thing existed as Latino history or Mexican American history when I started there.
But by the late 1960s, ethnic, the infants, infancy stage, if you will, of ethnic studies was just getting off the ground.
I had the opportunity to study with a man at ucla, Juan Gomez Quinones, who was there at the beginning, right. He was a Latin Americanist, but beginning to shift his research orientation, his writing orientation to Mexican Americans, to Chicanos, because of the Chicano student movement, right. He was, he was part of that, and I became a part of it. And so by the time I meet him in 1968, 1969, he's teaching the first Chicano studies course ever offered at ucla, and it may have been the first ever in the University of California system.
And I was immediately attracted to it, right, because it opened my eyes in ways that other history courses, because I'd already declared history as a major, hadn't opened my eyes, with the exception of a course on slavery, but it was that experience of taking that course and making a connection to one.
And he immediately took me under his wing and I was there to see the origins of the field of chicano history and to be a part of it. And that was exciting, it was ominous because we didn't have much of a foundation, right. But we knew at that time we were doing something creative and new, and if we could pull it off, we could start a new field of Chicano history, of Chicano studies, and in larger context, ethnic studies. But it was not knowing whether we would be successful.
We were writing our articles and writing our books and hoping it would take effect.
We knew we had a role to play as some of the very few people at these institutions of higher education developing this field.
So for me, it was always in the frontal lobe of, let's prepare, let's teach our undergraduates across the board as much as we can, those that seem to be catching on to this area of Chicana and Chicano studies, let's mentor them, let's see which of them have an interest and an aptitude to go on to PhD study, and let's see if we can convince the History department and other departments to start admitting these graduate students so that. That we would be working with them very closely as the next generation or the next cohort of historians doing this work. And I think within 10 years, I realized we had a foothold. We had a foothold. And as I saw the graduate students take flight with their PhDs in hand, Vicky Ruiz, Antonia Castanella, your mentor, Steve Pitti, Laurie, all of them, right, all of them going on to likewise teach at American universities and likewise train graduate students, that's led to the fluorescence of the field at the same time as these books are written and as these articles are written and, you know, so many excellent pieces, that builds the confidence of the profession to say, hey, we've. There's something happening here, a history about a people that simply had not been written by historians prior, for the most part, to the 1970s. And it's growing and it should be supported now. That varies across the different institutions, but at Stanford, they understood that we were onto something. And though our numbers of faculty of color and Latino faculty never grew very large, the institution responded in ways to allow us to become part of that institutional mission in ethnic studies and Latino history, Chicano history.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: When I think about those early days of the field, I think when we hear about figures like Mario Barrera or Rudy Acuna or even Juan Gomez Quinones, we hear a lot about the internal colonialism paradigm, you know, that. Think about it in. In terms of, like, the title of Rudy Acuna's book, Occupied America, that the Southwest has been occupied by The United States, and it's an internal colony of the United States.
When I think of the early feel that way, am I kind of overstating the importance of internal colonialism as a paradigm? And were there lots of other ideas as well, or was that really the main framework of seeing the field?
[00:29:46] Speaker B: The internal colonial model resonated with a lot of people, first and foremost. It allowed us an analytical framework to understand the nature of institutional societal inequality based on race and class and other factors as well. So as an explanatory model, there was a lot of value to it, right.
But it was also part of several, or it was among several other things that we were dealing with in terms of not so much conceptual models, but analytical frameworks to. To explain the group experience.
And so it was all in response to. Reacting to the dominant paradigm of Americanization, right. Of. Of American amalgamation of the assimilation model as it dictated, basically, scholarship about ethnic groups and especially ethnic groups for 40 years prior to the internal colonial model. But some people were bringing in Marxist analyses, right.
Other people were trying to reform, reframe it in terms of how can we use things like the internal colonial model but not be hamstrung by it in terms of its ability to explain other things? Right?
So, for example, if you had.
If. If there was emerging amalgamation, integration, that there was penetration of class, class formations that were evolving by the 1970s, the internal colonial structure was difficult to explain that. So we were talking about the nature of institutional inequality, right? Yes, Systemic. Systemic societal problems that surface from both ideology of people, laws, the whole framework. So I think what. What we can see with the internal colonial model is that it was one of many analytical frameworks that a lot of us kind of picked and. And would choose. What helps us explain the experience as we're starting to tell these stories, right? And I think that's very important. What were the most effective tools for us as historians and social scientists and. And. And behavioral scientists to tell the story, the experience. Understand the experience of this enormous population, a very diverse population across the United States.
[00:32:23] Speaker A: Well, one of the things I was talking with Laurie Flores about recently when we discussed her book Awaiting Their Feast, is how, you know, one of the. The most important things that the field is doing right now is attempting to explain just the great diversity of Latinos in every way. Ideological diversity, national background, faith backgrounds, everything you can imagine. Class backgrounds.
And when I think back to your first book, Chicanos in a Changing Society, about, you know, Mexican. The Mexican community in Santa Barbara in the late 19th century, I think one of the things that it really opened up for me was thinking about the class diversity of class and racial diversity and different experiences of Mexicans in Santa Barbara. And so, you know, I don't know if I was misreading that first book or if Stephen Pitti gave me ideas about that first book or this was my own reading, but did you think of Chicanos in a changing society and the ways in which it introduced us to a pretty complex community as a way of, you know, laying the groundwork for understanding the diversity of Mexican communities, the internal diversity of Mexican communities in a way that, you know, that doesn't fully make sense if you have a rigid understanding of internal colonialism.
[00:33:50] Speaker B: You know, that's exactly right. Because as I was doing the research for that book, I was coming in with certain assumptions that Latino people, Mexican origin people, Spanish speaking people would have this kind of, this certain homogeneity to it so they could understand and appreciate one another. But one of the first things I encountered in doing that research in Santa Barbara, because it had one of the still largest Spanish American populations that went back to the 19th century, right? And there were still the descendants of that, what I call Pueblo, the Santa Barbara Pueblo population, almost coexisting side by side with the influx of a new Mexican immigration population. Right.
So I went with the assumption, oh, these people would, would see each other in commonality and join hands and, and intermarry. But there, there were some tensions and there were differences. Right.
It didn't mean that there couldn't be relationships form.
But that showed me from the get go that the assumptions you come in with, you better be prepared as you do the research to be more facile about understanding complexity. Right. And it's the grow, it's, it's how a historian also grows in her or his analysis, using the skills and the resources to, to stay open to even contesting your own ideas going in. But that was, that was an introduction for me to understand the nature of this complex and grow over time, over the course of the 20th century, incredibly complex population we call Latinos and Latinos or Latinx people.
[00:35:39] Speaker A: And that book was published in 1979, right?
[00:35:43] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:35:44] Speaker A: And so that was again, just another way in which you were ahead of your time. Al, in that early moment when you were at ucla, were you thinking about, or in conversation with Puerto Ricans in New York who were kind of mounting similar, similar efforts, or in Chicago where you had early ethnographies of the Mexican and Puerto Rican community here, or was it really focused in Los Angeles and California at that time.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: So for me and so many other people, the Latinos as. And the Chicano and Chicano scholars, as we began to form networks. And the first was the national association of Chicano and Chicano Studies, which was formed in the 1970s. And I was on the ground floor of that.
The first exposure was to understand the diversity that existed within the Mexican origin population across states. Because I had never been to Texas, I had never interacted with the Hanukkah, I had never spent time much in Arizona, understand those. Those Mexican origin populations. And there, there were differences among us, right? But we came to appreciate that. And that also gave us a better understanding of the diversity based on locality and state experiences, right? Because there were some real differences. The Mexican folks in Texas had to endure a type of racial exclusion that we saw in California, but never quite. Quite to the same extent.
So it. That too was an eye opening for me. I had never had contact with Puerto Rican or Cuban folks, Dominican folks.
But that changed in the early 1980s, and it was changed because of the Ford Foundation. And it was at a time when I was. Had. I became the founding director of the Stanford center for Chicano Research.
And of course, one of the first things that a university Office of Development does, oh, if you got to raise money for your research, the university will pay for your staff and other things, but you have to raise money for your research. So you better go out and talk with the foundations. And I did that for the first time. And the one foundation that clearly was at that time, and this is the early 1980s, had already established an agenda from about a decade earlier of supporting ethnic and racial studies programs.
And when I went to the Ford Foundation, I think it was 1983, and this was to support research with an organization that, that.
Well, it was the seed of the organization. I had talked with the directors of Mexican American or Chicano studies program programs and research centers at the University of Texas, at UCLA and at Stanford. And we decided we were going to see if we could get the Ford foundation to support our work. And when I met with the program officer in charge of what was really the first robust program area in Hispanic studies, it was clear to me that. He made it clear to me that have you reached out to any of the Puerto Rican scholars? You know, there's a. There's a Center de Estudios Puerto Ricanos at Hunter College, City University, New York. I think you should speak with this guy named Frank Bonilla. And that opened the door, and I'm so grateful that, that, that was recommended to me because I established a strong relationship and created with the Puerto Rican scholars, Frank Bonilla in particular one of the, really the fathers of Puerto Rican studies. And we established the inter University Program for Latino Research. And the Puerto Rican Studies center at City University in New York became one of the four founding institutions of this now Inter Latino Pan Latino Research Network.
[00:39:52] Speaker A: I want to end al by asking a kind of more personal question, maybe it's even a personal advice question for me and probably many others as academics who are also trying to live a life as academics. And so I want to know what your secret is to an academic life well lived. One of the things you write in Compton in my Soul is that you made a decision early on in your career that above all you wanted to be the best father and husband that you could be. And then you wanted to build structures at Stanford and other institutions that would make them, you know, believe in the commitment to racial equality that you have. And then you wanted to do your own research.
So all of this makes you, in my mind, and I think many others minds as well, a kind of model of well, roundedness and, and humanity. And I'm wondering what the secret is.
[00:40:51] Speaker B: Well, no, thanks. Thanks for the compliment. I appreciate it, Jerry. And part of it of course, emanates from having a rich family life growing up, right. We were poor, we did the best we could, but the family, the family coherence and those relationships with siblings and, and mother and father set the foundation.
And I think what I realized early on, Jerry, is that as one of the early academics to go into higher education, the demands on us were enormous.
And I'd already begun to see some of my colleagues whose relation, whose marital relationships were falling apart, that they, you know, that they lamented already that they weren't spending time with their children. And I think it was clear to both me and Susan, my wife, you know, we, I, we met as 19 year olds, 18 year olds that we had, both of us had demanding professions.
But we want, as we made the decision to have children. And by the way, it was after the first book was published, things were too crazy before that that we wanted to be there, we wanted to be a part of their lives. And whether it was conscious, in a lot of ways unconscious, it's a juggling act, as you well know, that there's so many professional demands and you can let that overwhelm you, right, and, and you can forget or ignore or not spend enough time on the other side. But so for me it was spending the time with family as we had children, to be a coach because I love sports and to see that part of our children's development and to share responsibilities with Susan. So that was a partnership.
And yeah, certain things drop sometimes, right? I might not get an article done or the research was taking too long, but that juggling act, as I look back, I'm glad we did that because it allowed us to have that rich family experience. And, and as your children mature, you see that they, they adhere oftentimes to the same values that are, that they inculcate in their relationships with their children now our grandchildren and that, that's really the payoff to see the children become such wonderful professionals and parents at the same time. So whatever we did, whether sometimes consciously, sometimes not, it worked.
[00:43:33] Speaker A: Yeah, it sure did. And we just all need more alcamarillos in the world. And thank you so much for joining us. I think our listeners are going to get a lot out of this. And listeners, if you haven't already picked up and read Compton in My Soul, make it the next thing you do. Thank you. And thank you so much for joining us, Al.
[00:43:50] Speaker B: My pleasure. It's always, it's always great to see you, Jerry, and always wonderful to talk to you.
[00:44:01] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to season three of Writing Latinos.
We'd love to hear your suggestions for new books that we should be reading and talking about. So drop us a line at geraldoupublicbooks.org that's G E R A L D oublicbooks.org this episode is brought to you by Public Books. It was produced by Tasha Sandoval. Our music is City of Mirrors by the Chicago based band Dos Santos. You can follow us on Blue Sky, Instagram and X to receive updates about season three of Writing Latinos. I'm Geraldo Cadava and we'll see you again soon.
