September 6, 2024
One of the first things we talked about when we met last time was the transition from undergraduate to graduate student publication. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about what your approach to publication was as an undergrad, what that process was like, and what it was like getting funding for research.
Well, I was only able to think that my undergraduate work was worthy of an audience that extended to more than just my advisor, my thesis reader, and a close group of friends whom I wouldn't stop harassing with my thesis because I overestimated my own competence (as I think undergrads tend to do). And I think that now, as a graduate student, I probably wouldn't be as ready to publish something until I've sat on it for a long time. But back then, you know, I felt like I was at a moment in my life where like all things seemed possible and one could kinda foolishly think “Oh, I just got into art history this year. So clearly the next thing that I must do is apply for an art history conference. It doesn't matter that I'm an undergraduate, no one will care.” And, of course, I had a team of advisors who didn't dissuade me from that and didn't point out why that wasn't necessarily the best idea. And so I submitted a paper to a conference based in a discipline that I had just gotten into in the past three months for my thesis research. And the paper got accepted. And then the other thing that I didn't realize (and that I would never do now) is that I then felt that once I was at the conference, writing about this mural that I had just stumbled upon in the archives and photos of it, I then decided that what I must do at this conference is print out copies of my conference paper and just foist them upon people who I felt were important. I think it's partially because I was 22 and overly eager and innocent and was very clearly an undergraduate (the one undergraduate at a conference of primarily graduate students finishing their dissertations or master's theses or faculty members because it was a state-of-the-field conference). I think people were willing to play ball with it. They were willing to not deflate my sense of myself, they were like, ah, it's okay, grad school will deflate that for them one day. But then that worked out. I foisted my paper, then a couple days later I got an email from one of the people, who later became one of my mentors, and he was like, I'm passing this paper on to my colleague who's putting together an edited collection on the muralist you wrote about. And I was like, that's great.
So what was your experience of the archive? I guess I mean both as an experience in that physical space and also how it informed your understanding of academic research and publication?
I went to the archive three separate times on three different funds - one was a summer research fund, another was that I got some money on the side through a conference grant, and the third was that I applied for additional money to go take one more trip once I had figured out what I wanted to do. But the first time going in, I thought that what everyone did when they go to the archive is,like, have a game plan with like the 10 things they need. But, as I later learned at Berkeley, I had undiagnosed ADHD, so I couldn't even do that. So I told myself I would just show up for the summer and just look through everything that there was to look at, a step at a time, which kind of annoyed the archivist, but really made the Chicano Studies Research Center's social media person quite happy because I was in their library just long enough that on his lunch break, I presume, he saw me one day and was like, “Hey, you're that undergraduate who's here most hours from like 9 a.m. to 5 p. m. Right?” And I'm like, “Yep, that's me.” And I feel like the subtext was and you're here that long for three weeks at a time because you didn't make a list of what you wanted. You're just like perusing everything. Well, I was doing that and I stumbled upon a letter from the muralist that I'm writing about, Antonio Bernal, about the mural that he made. And the curator for the exhibition that I was writing on wanted to include that mural in a slideshow of other murals. And Antonio is pointing out that actually he made the mural just for a theater company and the way that it was worded kind of made it seemed as if the theater company, El Teatro Campesino, the first Chicano theater troupe, might have actually tried performing in front of it. And I was like, this is really interesting. And I just filed that away and went about my archival research until I started writing my thesis. And when I was doing the literature review, then all of a sudden I kept seeing this mural reappear everywhere. It was kind of uncanny, in the classic sense of the uncanny, from the Freud essay, by which he means like sometimes you think a thought and then all of a sudden that thought manifests all over. So you're thinking of the number seven and all of a sudden you're seeing sevens all over. For me, the thought was this mural and everywhere I go, I would see this mural. In fact, it got to the point where I took a spring break road trip with some friends along the California coast. And I insisted that we stop at the current El Teatro Campesino headquarters in San Juan Bautista. And there, framed on the wall, was a picture of this mural. I was like, this mural's following me everywhere!
Did that uncanniness inform any of what eventually got written for the piece?
Yes. I think that as the year progressed, and my mentors were pressuring me to hurry up and write, they eventually encouraged me to maybe make something of this repeated uncanny sighting of the mural that I kept seeing in various scholarship that was important to the field of Chicano Art History. And so I ended up writing a historiographic section to my thesis, which later evolved into the finished piece. One of the early drafts of the piece was this really weird, meditative, somewhat post-structuralist, somewhat new materialist, (insert jargony keyword here) take on how the mural was a set piece that conscripted its performers and blah ba dee blah blah. And everyone was like, yeah, okay, you get that this publication is going out to folks who have not very much interest in reading about your meditations, about how we're constantly being hailed by things in the world and whatnot. And I was like, I guess I get that. So then I rewrote it in a more straightforward way where I was just very simply, this mural is really important to the development of the scholarly field, and I can tell because it's cited all over the place. And then I did the thing it feels like everyone always instructs their grad students to do, because this is what I am currently being instructed to do, which is: you say what people have done, then you make a tiny intervention and you act like it's the best thing since sliced bread. And in my case, it was that no one has talked about how people have performed in front of this mural. And then that was my thesis, and I just wrote about that.
So how long was that process - moving from the early stages of research and eventually into publication?
I dragged it out over two years. They wanted to publish it after a year, but I was holding back the process because I didn't know how to write clearly and for a more general audience than just fellow literary studies academics. It was kind of funny because I sent this essay about the mural out to several of my friends who owed me favors. And they all got back to me with, I don't understand why you're pretending to be an art historian, when clearly you're just treating this mural as if it were any other kind of textual object. But, apparently, the editors of this anthology, (while I was doing this) stumbled across the muralist Antonio Bernal's unpublished manuscript for a novel, and they were like, oh, we should write about this too. And they were like who would want to do this? Miguel, can you write an eight page thing on this? So I wrote that, and because it was solidly in my wheelhouse, it actually ended up being the cleaner piece of writing, and I had the experience of sending it out to my friends. And they were like, wow! This reminds me that you can, in fact, write sentences I can understand. Which was good, so I was toggling between these two, trying to shape up the longer, 30 page, archivally based argument into something that would matter to people, all the while remembering that I had this 8 page thing that I got done in I think 2 or 3 goes, and that the copy editor loved because she could understand every word, and then I fixed it.
And when they were published, were you already a graduate student?
Yeah, at that point I was in my first year of graduate school. The big development that came for me is that I came into graduate school thinking that I would be a scholar of the Chicano art movement, primarily focusing on, I guess, its visual art and also its literature, maybe its performance as well. But during that time, because I was having the run of the mill first semester of graduate school depression (we were also in a pandemic), I was trying my best to read everything but what I was assigned to actually read in courses. And in my case, that ended up being a syllabus from UChicago, for their Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology graduate seminar. And that syllabus gave me the conceptual language that I felt I needed to finally write clearly about the mural. So I got to graduate school, became interested in that (which is what I'm currently interested in) - thinking about how one can apply the tools of linguistic anthropology to literary study - then I rewrote my mural paper and it just clicked. I was like, ah, this is what I need to do. It was much clearer than my previous attempts.
So how has your idea of the relationship between research and publication evolved since you got to graduate school?
I think that since I've gone into graduate school, I have really fallen in love with litotes, oxymorons, and other kinds of phrasings where two parts are held in tension. So I think that the graduate student way of being in the world is a kind of immodest modesty. You hope what happens is you go to the archive, like I did as an undergraduate, you find a thing, and then you're able to somehow blow that thing up into an entire intervention that makes a difference in the scholarship for a field, ideally more than one field. In my case it's always a substantive field of Chicanx and Asian American literature, because I'm doing relational stuff- or Latinx, Asian American— while also being the kind of more methodological or theoretical field of folks who are thinking with linguistic anthropology and literature. So that kinda remained the same. I guess it was tweaked a bit. And at first I was willing to put myself out there because I didn't really understand what I was doing. And now I'm willing to put myself out there because I need a job at the end of this. And that seems like a safe tack to take. One thing that I did learn is that, when I was an undergraduate, I had this habit of making sweeping generalizations based on my willingness to sit at a single place. For eight hours a day, for three weeks at a time in the archives, I would really act as if no one else had thought to look here, and I would try to sell myself. Whereas now I kind of understand that there are certain days where you can’t even bring yourself to do the readings for a class you are teaching. It's not that people didn't think to look. It's that there is only so much time in a day. And this has affected how I communicate the archival findings. I usually treat it as more circumstantial, happenstance. Like you know, I happened to stumble upon this. How lucky am I?
In your time at graduate school, what role has faculty mentorship played in your development as a researcher and scholar?
I actually have a signal moment that made me feel like I was a graduate student, which I feel sometimes is discussed as that kind of liminal space or liminal time in your life where you go from being treated as just a student by the faculty to gradually being seen as an eventual colleague, if not actually already a colleague (or at least intellectually, if not professionally). That signal moment was when, at the beginning of my second year, I went to go meet with my current advisor, John Alba Cutler. And I was telling him about how I was thinking of changing my research interests from Chicanx to Latinx and Asian American. John focuses primarily on Latinx literature and I had become really interested in thinking with linguistic anthropologists and their body of research for my scholarship. What took me by surprise, and also made me feel what graduate mentorship is like and how it differs from being mentored as an undergraduate by a faculty member, is that I thought that he would respond with “Oh, I don't really do relational stuff. And I also don't really do linguistic anthropology of literature. You should go find someone else.” And maybe he could have directed me to Michael Lucey in the comparative literature department who does do that (and who I am also working with), but instead he just asked me to name five things that I think he should read in order to better understand my work. And that was really generous. And so far he has continued to show a generous understanding of my work. And that has also been true for my other mentors on my dissertation committee, like Kent Puckett. I did an exam list with him that was called “Language in Use and the Organization of Social Experience.” That was a linguistic anthropology list. And from what I understood, he actually went through and read the stuff on the list (or at least he appeared to have read them whenever we did our 3 hour long conversations every other week in preparation for my oral examinations). Whereas when I was an undergraduate it was more like, “I want to work on this, let me go find the faculty member who's working on just this exact thing,” which is how I ended up having so many mentors. I had one in art history, I had one in the music department, I had two in comparative literature, I had three in English. So I just kept shuttling back and forth between people, not yet recognizing that part of what being a colleague and being seen as a colleague means is that every now and then you do actually have to go learn about your colleagues’ work, which I think is what John and Kent have been doing, which is a part of growing, and the kind of mentorship that one receives.
That's wonderful to hear that there was that kind of mutual facilitation of scholarly interests that were targeted at your own development as an intellectual colleague. So what's your current area of academic interest and research?
So, one thing that I've learned during my four years of graduate school and my five years of writing various applications for various monies (that I frequently do not get), is that you have to kind of learn to retcon your previous interests in such a way that they account for your current ones. So the way that I've been doing that is that I've expanded out from thinking about public art, specifically murals, which is what I was writing about in my undergraduate thesis, to thinking about the concept of the public as such, and who gets to count as a member of the public, and on what grounds. I’ve been pointing out that, since the demographic transition inaugurated by the 1965 immigration reforms, the public increasingly consists of Latinx and Asia Americans, two groups of citizens who are both, yet in different ways, occasionally treated as if they were not full citizens in the cultural sense. Unlike other members of the public, we are treated as if we were perpetually foreign, or alien-citizens, and this treatment characteristically plays out in the public activity par excellence: talking with other strangers as fellow strangers among strangers, as fellow members of the public. Given the importance that stranger-to-stranger talk should play in thinking about how we are racialized as alien-citizens, I am arguing that one of the chief conceptual resources of Latinx and Asian American literary narrative form after 1965 is the vantage point it affords us on studying how strangers talk to one another and how the formal organization of stranger talk feeds into our racialization as perpetually foreign.
What kinds of primary texts are you working with?
Mostly novels, memoirs, and literary non-fiction. I'm interested in texts that I can productively put into conversation with texts that are more commonly regarded as canonical within the Anglo American tradition as a way of trying to draw attention to the taken-for-granted assumptions that undergird those texts and the prevailing conceptions of what it means to be part of a public that circulate through them. So for example, two texts that I'm focusing on are Gish Jen's novels, Typical American and its sequel Mona and the Promised Land that are a generational narrative focusing on one Chinese American family across two different generations; and how it is that different understandings of what's polite to do in public and what's not might be exposed as not those of the receiving cultures in a way that wouldn't, for example, happen in a Henry James novel or another Anglo-American novel of manners, where all the characters are culturally the same.
Could you recommend a book based around the current interests you’ve been describing?
I've recently rediscovered Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s book The Undocumented Americans. I wrote it off when I first read it two years ago - at a party to another graduate student who concluded from me writing it off that I must care neither about women or about migrants. But I wrote it off because I felt that it just wasn't a very good example of a testimonial text. That is, a text where a narrator, usually a reporter or academic, is trying to speak on behalf of a larger collective whose members cannot speak on their own behalf. But then I started looking at it more closely, and I'm like, I feel like Cornejo Villavicencio's project really is trying to trouble our expectation for this kind of authenticity coming out of people like her, and the tendency to read narratives about undocumented migrants specifically as if they were testimonial, even when they're disavowing that category. And ever since getting to that realization, I'm like, I actually really like her book. I feel like people should assign it more, generally.