What’s your mission in academia?
To contribute to our understanding of Latin American history through publishing scholarly books and articles, presenting conference papers and public lectures, teaching university students, helping to create opportunities for colleagues and students to pursue their research and teaching interests, and serving as an adviser to junior colleagues and students.

What’s in your job description?
I have a joint appointment in the history department and as director of the Center for Latino and Latin American Studies. I am the history department’s senior scholar in Latin American History, and I teach Modern Mexico, Modern Latin American Revolutions and graduate seminars on such topics as Race and Nation. As center director, I am responsible for the administration of the minor in Latino and Latin American Studies, the graduate concentration in Latin American Studies, a lecture series, grant programs, outreach activities and collaborations with Latino student organizations, the Latino Resource Center and other offices on campus concerned with diversity and multi-cultural issues.  

How did you become interested in your subject area?
I have always been interested in history, but I began to focus on Latin American history as an undergraduate student at San Diego State University. In 1968 and 1969, I took train trips from the border to southern Mexico, visited remote villages and pre-Columbian sites, and lived in Mexico City during the student protests that preceded the massacre at Tlateloco. Those experiences encouraged me to learn more.

What do students learn from you?
In addition to information about Latin America, they learn how to think, to analyze and to write about complex historical problems. I want them to appreciate the complexity of studying history and culture, and to understand something about societies that are different from their own.

What’s your current research?
I am currently writing a book on how Latin American elites have used the construction of historical memory to promote their political and cultural agendas, and how these representations have succeeded or failed. I am focusing on centennial celebrations of political independence in Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Venezuela. I have published articles and delivered conference papers on this theme, and I have a book contract. In February, I will be presenting a paper on this research at an international conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

What’s a good book you recently read?
Khaled Hosseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns.”

Where do you go in DeKalb for a good meal?
Thai Pavilion.

Why did you choose your first college/university?
In the mid-1960s, California Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, Jerry Brown’s father, understood that access to affordable higher education would allow tens of thousands of working-class teenagers to go to college and to achieve social mobility. I went to a community college in San Diego tuition-free and worked part time to pay for my books. When I graduated, I enrolled at San Diego State and paid $69 a semester in tuition. For me, cost and location determined where I could go to college.

What is your favorite aspect of your subject?
I enjoy making contributions to our understanding of historical questions of significance, such as: How do social classes form? How do we explain the historical and cultural tension between race and nation? How is historical memory constructed and used for political purposes? Why do people revolt? And why do revolutions succeed or fail at meeting their objectives?

What makes you class interesting?
Students enjoy learning the narrative sweep of history as well as insights into the intimate lives of people from diverse social and racial backgrounds. I assign a variety of materials including historical overviews, biographies, novels, personal testimonies, documentaries and films. I combine lecture and discussion, and I try to relate historical material to contemporary issues to help students make informed decisions about current and future events.

Photos by George Tarbay, NIU Media Services

Department: History

Hometown: San Diego, Calif.

My degrees: Ph.D. in history, University of California, Berkeley; master’s degree in history, University of California, Berkeley; bachelor’s degree in history, San Diego State University.

Arrived at NIU: 1984

I teach: Latin American history