"Unapologetically curious."
Professor Bill Nericcio (English & Comparative Literature, SDSU) on rasquaschismo, academic style: turning "joyless bureaucracies" into humanities "engines of culture."
Professor Bill Nericcio (English & Comparative Literature, SDSU) is the author of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America (Texas, 2007), co-author of Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen, and creator of Mextasy, which he describes as a “Traveling Circus of Desmadres,” a 3D manifestation of how the genius of Chicano/a culture survives the deformations of the white gaze. One of the best parts of being Bill’s colleague is seeing over the years his powerful creativity extend in so many directions, so resourcefully, and with a consideration for the underdog–for students–for labor–at its heart. This is exemplified for me in a recent project launching the new YA fiction Xopan imprint via San Diego State University Press. Here he is on the good fight to keep the humanities curious, joyful, and human.
You've never done doom spiral.
No, no, life's too short. [Recently,] I was at Houston Community College. I finished my charla / presentation, and this young African-american girl asked, “Where do you get so much energy?” And I said, “Time's running out. Tick, tock! I hear the sands of time. They're like boulders to me. We don't have time to be sad. We gotta use the time we have left to shake $#!^ up.”
What I usually ask people is, when did you decide to do it differently, but I'm thinking about you back in grad school at Cornell–in the theory hub, coming in as a Chicano from Texas. . . .
Wild right? Well, I was an exotic animal, I mean. they did not know where to put me. I didn't know where to be. I was so out of place, out of space, out of time. What happened at Cornell was for the first time in my life a majority culture Mexican American became a minority. And that freaked the $#*^ out of me. I didn't like being treated differently. In Laredo, there are class differences, but no one bothers you because you're Mexican. Everyone's Mexican. At Cornell, I suddenly became this trophy scholarship boy that they would trot out. They needed a faculty representative for the Hispanic studies initiative, and they didn’t have any. I wasn't even a faculty member. I was a second-year graduate student. And the consequence of that is that I became radicalized in grad school because I became a minority. For the first time I became Chicano I was never Chicano. I was Mexican-American or Tejano.
Comparative literature at Cornell was traditional and conservative but there happened to be professors there that were the antithesis of that. So, for instance, no one was qualified to guide my seminar in Chicano literature. So John W. Kronik—then editor of the PMLA (1985–92), no less—stepped up and supervised my independent study on Chicano literature and read the books alongside me. Which was incredible. This is the story of my journey. I happen to fall in with remarkable people—Ramon Salidvar, Gayatri Spivak, Maxine Hairston-–who then leave a trace on me. And then I go on doing my humanities thing.
I love that you tell your story embracing the contingency and the chanciness of it all, because I think one of the things that's gripped us in this moment is a need for certainty and security . . . .
That induces its own form of paralysis! If we keep doing what we do best, then we grow. Our English department, for whatever reason, is growing. Some of us are going out of our way to teach in a way that is inspiring, and the students will come. Yes, that's right.
I wanna talk about your methodology because the rasquachismo, this willingness to just keep mixing and remixing, has given your career such a variety and breadth. I love that you are the point of entry for satirists and artists to come visit campus, and you are a visual artist and put up exhibitions, and you run a press, and . . . tell me about what it's been like to build on so many fronts at once.
One of the things that inspires me is that the students have no advocates, and for whatever reason I'm a full %^$# professor and that comes with a lot of—what do they tell Spiderman? With great power comes great responsibility. My responsibility is to try to get bureaucratic and structural impediments out of the way. I mean, we're a great school at San Diego State University with transcendently good professors, but the model of the state university is that we pour information into empty receptacles, empty heads—like Gradgrind, the drudge utilitarian teacher in Dickens’s Hard Times. That's not me. I'm from Laredo, Texas, I'm from the border. I'm a cultural schizophrenic, alienated, and working class—unapologetically working class. Many of our students here at SDSU are First Gen, and I want them to experience [something different from the state school model].
You have used resources of the institution in whatever shape they have come to you. All of them you have commandeered to platform the brilliance of working-class Chicano creative culture.
Manipulating these engines of culture in order to do things that I think are fun and valuable and meaningful . . .
Like having brilliant Chicano/a artists to campus and starting a new young adult novel series for the young people of this region. How do you articulate for your students the values that drive you?
Well, I do it through my teaching. I don't preach. I'm always trying to tell our young TAs and our future teachers– “You don't walk into a room to teach. You walk into a room and let the people in the room watch you get high on what you're teaching, and they don't have to love the book you're teaching, but they will love your enthusiasm.” I will feel like they're in a room with someone who is— I love this phrase—unapologetically curious. That's what the humanities have to do right now. Enthusiasm, joy, passion. The intellectual has to be provocative and social.
My class right now is called The Sensual Labyrinth. I had written a new course description for our department called “Chicanx Comics.” And five days before the beginning of the semester, I was not excited about the class. I was oddly disengaged from my own teaching. That doesn't happen. I'm usually really excited. So I gave it a new name. I called it the “Sensual Labyrinth,” and we're all diving down this Chicano-Latino rabbit hole together. It's a small class for me. I usually teach 300. It's 17 humans, and we're having a blast. I'm having a blast. But it didn't come together till I found a hook or angle that I got excited about, and I wasn't excited about the latest flavor of identity politics. I wanted to come up with a concept that I could sell in the sense of getting people to buy into an idea. And the idea is, if you look at the twentieth century in the United States and beyond, there's these folks called Americans of Mexican descent—Chicanos, Hispanics, whatever-–that are making and crafting remarkable art, literature and movies that will stand the test of time.
Yep. So given how important it is to keep being excited about the work, where are the spaces in our profession-–if any—that are giving you joy? Because that's one of the things that has driven me on this little endeavor: our professional spaces have always been a little joyless, but they got really, really joyless with this humanities doom spiral talk. So where's the joy happening?
That's a tough question, Joanna. There's not a lot of joy in the bureaucratic structures of literature. But when some fool at another university wants to see my work, and then I go there and I share my own work—like a Johnny Appleseed. And to shake things up at SDSU I will bring the professor rock stars here–Lalo Alcaraz, Myriam Gurba, Ricky Rodriguez from UC Riverside–-to my class as I am doing this term. Carlos Kelly and his mentor Frederick Aldama will be coming as well.
I love that you are networking with your collaborators, with your people, wherever they are, welcoming the chance to go to a community college in Houston, because they have access to a thousand eyes. This work happens everywhere. Right?
If I wanna go somewhere, I'm gonna go somewhere. That's what I learned at the University of Texas and Cornell. I belong in any room I walk into, and that's what I try to teach my students. If you get a good education, if you make a concerted effort at thinking seriously about ideas, then there's no place you cannot be. You belong regardless. If you're first gen. Or third gen. Or tenth gen, right?
What would you say to tenure and promotion committees who are looking at what I'm calling emergent humanities–multimodal / experimental / collaborative / critical making / etc.?
I would say that brilliance manifests in multiple forms. It's about the process, about discovery. It's not about the object. The object is important. Craft is important, but what you will discover along the way—you're making other you’s, right? The you you do not know. The committees need to understand that the brilliance of our junior colleagues manifests in multiple ways. That doesn't mean that they don't have to publish. But maybe they're publishing in ways that you may not understand. Maybe I'm a 62 year old sociologist, and I don't listen to podcasts. Right? I'm playing golf. I’m going to Costco. But a podcast is a significant contribution that requires stamina to sustain. They need to learn to recognize that. We are monolingual in America, and we're mono-thoughtical. These full professors on the committee don't even realize (and no one will tell them) that they're deaf, that they're blind, they can't smell the beauty. And so this absence of the sensual makes us cater to rewarding a single type of professor.
Where are the eccentrics in the English department, right? Look at this crazy office behind me. “Oh, it's so weird, Bill.” It's not weird. It's me. I don't have to erase or elide the things that give me pleasure. c/s
