These days that I am writing my autobiography, I am patiently waiting for a publisher to contact me with an advance or a contract. Colleagues have generally doubted me, but I think I have always surprised people with how I have used my resources. Recently, for example, English dept. colleagues doubted that I could write a history of the Mexican Revolution, but, against difficult odds, I did. Later, the best living historian of that revolution kindly wrote a foreword for the second edition of my photo history, a book which I love but which cost me professionally.
The story of my life so far is turning out to be a beaut, since, IF encouraged, I am thinking of writing about the last 70 years! Many of the things I have written about and which many people disbelieved, including Latinos, have now been very publicly confirmed by Trump. This president is from my generation, the baby-boomers, and these people think like many of the people I have had to lived with. Even as I write, Crybaby Trump continues to wail for his wall. God knows what he will do with it, if he should succeed. He lives in New York and in Florida, and he has amply shown he doesn’t give a flip about Latinos. Still, Latinos are and we will be the future of the United States of America!
I was born in 1948 from a father with a fifth and a mother with an eighth-grade education, and I lived for 17 years in Edinburg, in south Texas, alongside my younger brother Eddie. Then I moved with school friends to work as a busboy in Chicago, to supplement my college expenses. Another summer I worked in London, and briefly traveled through France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. I returned and graduated from UT/Austin in 1970, before moving to Buffalo, New York, to SUNY/Buffalo (snow country) where I studied for four cold years! I received a Ph.D. in English there, in American Literature, largely because there were no courses in Mexican American life and culture connected with research fellowships on which my life depended. The English Dept. at UC/Berkeley stunned everyone by hiring me (of hundreds of applicants!) in 1974, its first Chicano Assistant Professor, where I lived and taught for five happy years, while I wrote and helped develop Chicano Literature. I worked with Ishmael Reed, and many distinguished scholars, but I was too young and inexperienced and I did not publish. That was not good for tenure, so I perished, but by then I had a young family to support. I applied for and was offered teaching positions at the University of Puerto Rico and UH/Clear Lake. My wife was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in New York and Buffalo, but we decided on Texas, because her relatives told us Puerto Rico would be a difficult place to school our son and daughter. In Texas, I taught at UH/Clear Lake by the NASA/Johnson Space Center and Texas A&M University. Another summer I taught at Purdue, and served two years as Arts and Sciences dean at Texas Southmost in Brownsville. I have had many adventures and misadventures, as I suggest, so I have many stories, impressions, and opinions that I hope to share with readers. Respond if you want more. Always, M.P.