Spanish or English: A Matter of Choice? (Part VIII)

This time around, with a set of reasonable expectations, I passed the doctoral exams without experiencing the slightest trauma.

A whirlwind of events immediately followed. First, I wrote my dissertation on Don Quijote de la Mancha, in English—for now I was far too excited about my development as a writer in this language to desist. I had conducted the necessary research three years earlier and saved the information in orderly files. And since I had plenty of time to dwell on the topic, the three-hundred page treatise seemed to write itself.

But in those three years away from Spanish something inside of me had changed. No longer was I the wide-eyed, idealistic student who had loved the language unconditionally. The experience of the failed exams had destroyed my innocence. Also, during that time I had discovered a new passion: English—and my heart now wanted to continue along this path. What’s more, having a doctorate in Spanish no longer meant the completion of a dream: it had become something akin to having fulfilled the stipulations of a business contract so I would be allowed to enter the teaching profession at the next level of play.

That step came when I accepted an offer to join the Department of Foreign Languages at Appalachian State University, in Boone, North Carolina. This meant moving to the east coast, a world away from everything I had ever known. But the lure of living on the cusp of the mystical Blue Ridge Mountains was too strong to resist—to this day I’ve never lived anywhere so beautiful.

My first years at Appalachian I was happy teaching Spanish. But as I began to probe my heart, searching for the area of research and publication I wanted to pursue, a place where I could carve out a small niche for myself as a scholar, I failed to find one. Having attended a couple of conferences devoted to Don Quijote, I knew that I didn’t want to pursue this path for I thought the Cervantistas a stuffy crowd. And the dilemma became worse after I scanned the entire horizon of Spanish and Spanish-American literature and found nothing that ignited a fire within me.

I was adrift, without an academic area, after many years of preparation, that I wanted to call home. I started to fear—and for someone who teaches college this is an enormous phobia—that my passion for studying had completely burned out, rendered a pile of ashes, and that I was destined to become someone who would never distinguish himself in his chosen field.

Submerged in this stagnant pool of scholarly ennui, I felt trapped, caught in a limbo where the meaning of one’s life work is absent. This changed, and abruptly, however, the day I strolled into a bookstore on Main Street, in Boone. Browsing through the stacks, I came across Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. I knew the novel, written by a Cuban-American, had won the Pulitzer Prize, so I took a chance and bought it. Reading that book changed my life as well as the way I looked at fiction written in the English.

When I wrote my earlier novels, I yearned for models—writers with a similar background to my own who straddled the line between cultures and languages and who saw the world in a way similar as I did, but at the time I could find none. I had now read such a writer.

(What I still find mystifying is that the characters in The Mambo Kings are eerily familiar, as if I had lived among them during my Los Angeles childhood. This was the same feeling I had upon first reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which Gabriel García Márquez managed to capture the essence of the people who populated my Nicaraguan adolescence.)

The discovery of Hijuelos and his work reignited a fire within my imagination, and that blaze started to roar like a furnace in the dead of an Appalachian winter. But I first approached the topic of US Latino and Latina Literature—written in English—from a scholarly perspective, not as a creator, for I firmly believed that my dream of becoming a novelist had been nothing more than a foolish catharsis against the disappointment of having failed the exams. Regardless, I suddenly possessed an academic obsession, an intellectual and emotional fervor I was willing to die for.

But this new found passion also divided me, and often times painfully. I was expected to teach Spanish, exclusively; but now the new calling of my soul, coupled with the knowledge I was accumulating at an astonishingly rapid rate and that I desperately wanted to share with the world, was pushing me even further into English.