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

In the classroom, my enthusiasm for teaching literature, in Spanish, remained unabated, for I had never really stopped loving the language and the culture. But outside of the classroom I had become a US Latino and Latina literature fiend. I read voraciously these writers that were, culturally-speaking, like me—that is, they also lived on the hyphen of split identity, such as being Mexican-American, Cuban-American, Puerto Rican-American, and so forth—and were writing in English.

Learning about these authors and their works was akin getting a second doctorate. But I didn’t mind the hard labor in the least because I was studying writers who told stories that closely resembled those I had unsuccessfully tried to tell years earlier. Yet, at the time, I didn’t consider them as models: I had given the dream of being a novelist my best shot, and I was now happy to try to become a scholar whose critical writings were respected within the academic community.

After I had become familiar with the existing studies in the field, I noticed a void: the need to prepare a volume of interviews with notable novelists. I convinced a colleague from the English Department at Appalachian State, Bruce Dick, to join me on the project. Together we spoke to Cuban-Americans writers such as Virgil Suárez, Roberto Fernández, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, Achy Obejas, and Cristina García; the Mexican-Americans Rudolfo Anaya (Bruce and I would go on to compile and edit Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya—the first collection of interviews ever published that were focused on a single US Latino author), Benjamín Alire-Sáenz, Demetria Martínez, Carla Trujillo, and Kathleen Alcalá; the Dominican-American Julia Alvarez; and the Salvadoran-American Marcos Villatoro.

Although the project was producing wondrous results, I burned out along the way. (The interviews, however, provided me with an excellent education regarding how these writers approach the craft. Also, Bruce took the idea in another direction and published an excellent collection of interviews: A Poet’s Truth: Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets.) Something inside of me—having nothing to do with the work at hand—snapped. To put it simply: I had become terribly unhappy living in North Carolina.

The first couple of years I resided in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains were blissful. I fell in love with the region, the people, and the university. I found many similarities between the local culture and those of Latin America: devotion to family, community, religion, and an openness and friendliness toward outsiders, like me. But with the passage of time, as the newness wore off, I started to feel isolated, utterly alone.

Among the 500 full-time professors at Appalachian State University, I was one of only two faculty members of Latin American descent. And my colleague taught in the sciences. Thus, it felt as if I alone was shouldering the burden of representing an entire culture on a campus of 13,000 students. I was, by default, the expert on “being” Latin American. As such, I was constantly invited to chat with classes and groups—something I truly enjoyed—and over the course of four years I made well over one hundred public presentations.

The problem was that people seemed to only want to hear about the left side of my mixed-heritage, the Nicaraguan side, and few appeared to care what I had to say about the entire hyphenated—Nicaraguan-American—equation. And I, for the first time in my life, fully appreciated the hyphen: it was the point where my two heritages, the Nicaraguan and the American, connected and interacted with one another to produce the identity with which I finally felt comfortable. I was completely at home straddling my cultures and their languages; and this posture, creatively-speaking, was bringing forth the best in me. And I, as a teacher, wanted to share this new understanding with my students. But getting the university to approve my teaching courses on US Latino and Latina literature became a bureaucratic maze that would take years to unravel. And impatience started to get the best of me.

The low point of my isolation came during a meeting of the Appalachian Humanities Council, of which I was the director. In that capacity I had brought several of the writers Bruce and I had interviewed to give talks on campus. While the Council members discussed which speakers we would invite the following year, a professor who was well-regarded on campus said, “I don’t think we need to invite any more Latino writers; they’ve already been well represented in our program.”

It was at that precise moment—after I had done all that I could to bring what I thought was the best of the Hispanic-American hyphenated experiences to the Blue Ridge Mountains—that I started to think about leaving.