The Past is a Footnote

Over the past few weeks I have been hearing from a variety of graduate students in my academic programs about their frustrations with the current curriculum. Normally I don’t pay much heed to the whining. A complaining graduate student is about as rare as a Popeye Pez dispenser. Disappointingly, they don’t jettison delicious candy from their throat, either. Trust me.

In these cases, though, the graduate-student concerns reflect a much more serious problem with History and American Studies as fields beyond Big Midwestern University. Many of these students arrived at BMU with the explicit intent of studying Chicano/Latino/a Studies. Yet, in their required courses on the U.S., they have read zero (0) books on Latino/as in the U.S.

I am concerned about these revelations less for the students already interested in Latino/a Studies. After all, they will do what similar scholars have always had to do. They will fulfill the expectations for their classes while simultaneously building reading lists on Latino/a Studies that they will complete on their own time. Despite their intellectual isolation, they will nonetheless persevere because they are committed to Latino/a communities.



Rather, I am worried about the students who are not explicitly interested in Latina/o Studies in those classes. These are students who will (if they have some luck) obtain jobs teaching U.S. history at other universities across the nation. They will do so having received the implicit message that it is acceptable to ignore the nation’s largest minority entirely. It will, in other words, replicate a disciplinary ignorance that has been in place since the nineteenth century.

Curriculum, of course, is a touchy subject. It is hard to bring up these issues without sounding like I am wagging my finger and clucking in disapproval. That’s probably because I bring these issues up while I am wagging my finger and clucking in disapproval.

Still, these classes are taught by colleagues whom I deeply respect. They are some mighty smart people whose own research is impeccable. We aren’t talking about secret members of the Klan in other words. I can guarantee they aren’t pushing a covert white supremacist agenda. Hey, that might not sound like such a ringing endorsement, but it’s not a guarantee that I could have made about some of my former colleagues in Texas. At Big Midwestern University, though, these are faculty who are fiercely interested in social justice issues.



So if these colleagues aren’t disciples of Lou “Immigrants are Hiding Under My Bed” Dobbs, just what is going on? Why is there a disconnect between their politics and their course content?

Latino/as’ long presence in this nation means they should appear in both halves of the traditional U.S. history survey. For most U.S. historians, though, Latinos (much less Latinas) remain an “and also” topic rather than being construed as fundamental to the history of the nation. If they make it onto a syllabus at all, Latinos are most likely to be found in the “Suggested Reading” section rather than in the “required” list.




Part of this is a problem much larger than academia. For the past 160 years, the United States has been in collective denial about Latino populations north of Mexico. The mass media periodically expresses “shock (SHOCK!)” that Latino/as account for a large slice of the nation every twenty years or so. Even in those moments, you can depend on the fact that Latino/as will be figured as “foreign” or “recent arrivals” rather than as communities with a century-and-a-half of history that informs their experiences in this nation.

But where would the media learn such things? Given my recent conversations with grad students, it turns out that even the best history departments can't be relied upon to teach that history.

This year, 2009, marks the fortieth anniversary of El Plan de Santa Barbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education. Back in 1969, Chicano/a college students were mighty pissed. Universities failed to acknowledge the contributions, struggles, and perspectives of Chicanos and Chicanas (and Latino/as more broadly) within the United States. These students turned their frustration into direct action. Most universities responded by creating subunits focused on Latino/a Studies. After four decades of activism, scholarship, and teaching within those units, it seems that Latino Studies has failed to convince other historians of their importance. And guess what? Latino/a students are still pissed.

It is to historians’ peril that they continue to bury their head in the sand around Latino/a issues. Today, twenty percent of the nation’s schoolchildren currently identify as Latina/o. The Census Bureau further predicts that Latino/as will constitute 28 percent of the nation’s population by 2050. Latino/as will profoundly change the face (literally) of higher education in the next decade.

What will the poorly trained historians we are producing tell those future students? That the nation’s history isn’t relevant for Latino/as? That a quarter of the nation's population isn't relevant for its history? That they would have learned more about Latinos in grad school, but it just didn’t seem that important? That salsa is delicious?

This is not to say that I think every U.S. historian must devote themselves to studying the experiences of Latino/as exclusively. I am saying, however, that it is inexcusable that we have graduate students earning Ph.D.’s who have little or no knowledge of this history. Savvy departments who are currently searching in any field in U.S. history would be wise to ask a new assistant professor how they will address the surging Latino/a Student body in their course content.



The knowledge and research that we conduct about the past means that historians have an unusual ability to speak about political and social issues in the present. By refusing to understand how much the nation’s population has actually changed, however, historians forfeit their intellectual authority.

Video Ga-Ga

Lots of good things have been going on lately. This, though, results is a lack of ideas for my little bloggy. We all know that my secret powers comes from my gravitas. Without that, I am nothing. Well, actually, I am still the most desirable man on the blogosphere – but I am just the most desirable man who has not much to say.

While we wait on that gravitas to return, take a look at some old music videos from the eighties. You know, sometimes I get to thinking about those old videos, and I miss them. Yeah, it’s not particularly original to bemoan the days when MTV actually played videos. When I was a young lad, however, my sisters and I spent hours glued to MTV. We memorized every detail of the original VJ's and created elaborate back-stories for them. We were pretty sure that Martha Quinn was sleeping with everybody. Who knew that she would later marry (in the t.v. world) on the Brady kids? Then MTV had this other woman we always referred to as "Tweety-Bird" because of her blond spiky hair -- Anybody remember her name? Eh

Still, that early eighties witnessed the creation of a stylistic art for music videos. It was not enough to simply get air-time, artists had to create visual entertainment to accompany their song. Many succeeded at this venture, but The Eurythmics and Queen became masters. Each of their videos had a particular tone. Those videos, in turn, became self-referential and mutally reenforcing. One needed to know all (or at least some) of the previous videos for the newer ones to make sense. Annie Lennox created alternate personalities and characters that almost had lives of their own. Freddie Mercury brought every gay iconic image to the small screen: Leather guy, eighties clone, weird-mechanic person. He had them all in his videos.

Some artists still put the same effort in videos (That cute lesbian Eminem comes to mind. She is a lesbian, right?). Where do those videos even get a venue?









Of course, as much as MTV always liked to claim it was avant-garde, it often balked at things that seemed too confrontational. We all remember the Cher-in-a-leather-band-aide verses Madonna-chained-to-the-bed controversy. Many people forget that long before that MTV-created cat-fight, the network policed gender roles with vigor. Two videos, in particular, made the MTV executives very nervous in the eighties: Queen's "I Want to Break Free" and The Eurythmics "Love is a Stranger."

Looking at both again, we can see why they made the suits so squirmy. Both are devoted to drag performances of different types. Yet, they are such absurd and cartoonish takes on gender, they suggest that all gender roles are just learned social performances (Judith Butler must have been a huge MTV fan) with no real root in biology.




Queen recreating the women characters of a popular British soap made the video a big no-no. Well, at least it made it a no-no until 10:00pm. After all, MTV still wanted to make a buck off the video if it could.

Mercury (without shaving his mustache) and the other members of Queen made exaggerated gestures to their female personas. They wore giant wigs, heavy makeup, and skimpy-minis. They all went about their business trapped within the urban domestic space. Mercury did the drudgery of housework while singing about wanting to break free. It's small wonder that Mercury opens a closet door in the middle of the video as the proposed escape from domestic hell. Opening doors, closet doors in particular, figured heavily in Queen's videos... I am just sayin'.

Beyond the closet door, we see all sorts of scenes of sexual freedom. Mercury romps around shirtless. He then rolls across virtually naked bodies of all genders. For Queen, breaking free was about tossing aside the crushing gender expectations of the household and escaping from the closet. Queen dissmised the unwavering conformity of the Reagan-Thatcher era. They suggested that young queers (or queens, if you will) could find happiness and contentment outside of the confinement of the traditional home.



Annie Lennox didn't get any warmer reception from MTV. An oft-repeated story is that Lennox had to provide confirmation that she was biologically female before MTV would accept the "Love is a Stranger" video. She so easily transgressed gender costumes, MTV allegedly became confused about her "actual" gender.

Lennox starts out the video in one of her eighties-personas: the blond bimbo. She gets into the car, mentioned in the song's lyrics, and vamps it up for the camera. As the video moves along, though, she rips off the wig to reveal the artifice of her gender performance. In that one step she moved from hyper-feminine to androgynous (or even masculine).

The rest of the video she tries on all sorts of different gender identities. Each becomes a play-thing and a mask, none any more real than the next. In case we missed the point, the video concludes with Lennox doing the robot dance -- Suggesting that all the previous gender performances had been as mechanical and artificial as any automaton.

None of the videos on MTV made a direct plea for sexual freedom. Yet, some still acknowledged that many people wanted more out of life than the rigid sexual conformity offered by the eighties. They provided a visual representation of things that many of us wanted to do if we had a little more freedom: Rip off the wigs and bust open the closet doors, all to a catchy tune.

Video, someone still loves you.