First Person

Hey, I Can Do This!

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By Pablo Mitchell

On a Wednesday morning last fall, I discovered that I had been invited to visit the campus of a small Midwestern college for a two-day interview. I was in Panama when I got the news, visiting a sick uncle. The problem was that the interview was scheduled for the following Monday.

I tried to hem, I tried to haw. Monday is awfully early, I said, I only get back into the country Friday night. But nothing worked. So Monday morning, I pulled out an atlas, jumped in a rental car, and hit the road.

The interview began at 11 in the morning and stretched until Tuesday afternoon, when my job talk was scheduled. After lunch with three students, I met a librarian, and then the first of several faculty members, before visiting with a group of Latina and Latino students at the Intercultural Center.

I was more nervous about this meeting than practically any of the others. As a person of mixed heritage (I have an Anglo/Latino background), I was worried about coming across as a poser, a not-quite Latino studying Latino/Latina history. But there were other concerns, as well.

I'm also a man studying feminism and the (re)creation of patriarchy. I'm a married heterosexual studying homophobia, heterosexism, and marriage as an institution of subordination. I'm from a middle-class background, and I'm describing the exclusions and structural inequalities basic to the making of middle-class America. All this in addition to the fact that I'm a graduate student trying to act like a professor.

These are all tensions in my work. How I present myself could provoke fairly painful, if at times justifiable, questions about my motives, my credentials, my political and intellectual commitments.

After working myself into a nice little self-absorbed frenzy on exactly those topics, I walked into the meeting, introduced myself, and began to explain my dissertation project to the 15 or so students who were interested in meeting a prospective professor. I described, somewhat lucidly I hope, how race and sexuality became critical tools in the disciplining of bodies in turn-of-the-century New Mexico. The themes of sex and embodiment are some of my favorite parts of my dissertation, and I was pleasantly surprised throughout the trip to see how much interest the study of sexuality seemed to attract.

No one at the meeting asked me how I got to be Latino, or how I had the nerve to claim to be able to teach Latino history, or how good my Spanish was (at least I was able to practice the week before, while I was in Panama), or any of the plethora of questions I had feared. Energetic, committed, and smart, the students seemed excited to meet me, and asked thoughtful and respectful questions. They talked about tutoring Latino schoolchildren from a nearby town and feeling overcommitted in their classes and politics, and about graduate school and wanting to make a difference in the world.

And a lot of them were mixed like me. They came from diverse backgrounds, from all over the country. They identified themselves as Puerto Ricans and Chicanos and Hispanics, talking of class differences and immigration and queer theory. Near the end of the meeting, a question came up about my family situation. Someone wanted to know if I planned to come to the town, make my home here, and raise a family. This was the only time during the entire visit that anyone asked that question so explicitly. The closest anyone else came, faculty members and administrators included, was to ask what I was doing in Pittsburgh.

There was a part of me that really wanted to answer the question. I think it's important for everyone, including Latinos, to be reminded that issues of sexuality are critical to understanding the way the world works.

At the same time, I think it's a question that often ends up marginalizing many people, so I didn't answer it. I tried in a nice way to say that the question wasn't quite proper, that it was a way to find out if a person was gay, or if a woman planned to take time off for pregnancy. I didn't want to be harsh, but I'd heard from my wife, Beth, about interviews for medical-residency programs, where questions about spouses and children and plans for the future were the rule, not the exception, and I had been thinking about sex and sexual orientation throughout the meeting. I'm still not sure if my response was the best way to answer the question. Fortunately, my answer didn't drag the conversation to a halt. Somebody else asked another question and, to my relief, we moved on.

The meeting was a nice emotional boost at a fairly shaky time for me. It's hard not to feel stupid as a graduate student, especially in the last stages of dissertation writing, when your preliminary exams are far in the past and you're expected to describe the significance of your work to a broader audience that has been doing this stuff a lot longer than you have. But then you meet interested students and realize, hey, I actually know stuff, I'm actually quite a bit more educated than when I was a sophomore in college. I can do this.

I rode that buzz through dinner with more faculty members and spent the rest of the evening rehearsing my speech. My job talk was slated for late the following afternoon, after a much appreciated break in the schedule. I had been told to aim the talk toward undergraduates, and to expect only a handful of questions from faculty members before they exited the room and left me to answer questions from the students.

With students in mind, I chose a piece from my dissertation on advertisements in New Mexico newspapers, which focused on how body practices (types of food eaten, proper clothes, whether one used patent medicines for ailments like constipation and impotence, whether one was fat or ugly or drank alcohol or spoke with an accent, etc.) helped determine status and civic respectability.

As usual, during the presentation my mouth was the Sahara -- I tend to get extremely nervous not just in front of students, but during any presentation whatsoever. When to pause and take a sip of water, I wondered frantically? Would my hand, now a tight fist in my pocket, shake noticeably when I finally took the bottle? Would I make a loud slurp? I was describing bodily actions deemed inappropriate in turn-of-the-century New Mexico. Would a soft gurgle and a thin dribble of water down my chin disallow my particular entrance into academic respectability?

At this point, the format of the job talk saved me. I was supposed to direct the talk to students. So, at a decent spot, I simply paused and looked around the room and asked if there were any questions, if I had been clear enough, if anything needed to be explained a bit more, and gratefully took a long drink of water. I'm sure I would have been afraid to do that in a more formal format like a conference presentation.

And that was it. I met with a couple other folks and was on my way back to Pittsburgh. I thought I had done a decent job with the presentation and for the most part, I had explained my dissertation well. I could imagine myself on that campus, teaching Latino history, joining cultural events, meeting with students. I would feel comfortable being mixed in that environment, with so many other mixed folks and people coming from all parts of the Latino and Latina community.

Within a week of returning home, two e-mail messages about my visit made me even more excited about the job. In the first, a student who had attended the meeting thanked me for answering the question of family status as I did, pointing out how important it is to support gays and lesbians in the Latino community.

The second e-mail, from the mother of a student, was easily one of the most thoughtful, generous notes I had ever gotten, or could ever hope to get. She talked about how happy she was to hear that the school was hiring a Latino historian and what a good impression I'd made on campus. What really touched me was that her daughter was mixed and, like me, a transplanted Westerner in the Midwest.

Maybe, I thought, this is the kind of place I belong, where everyone is, to one degree or another, an outsider. Not that I couldn't be happy and engaged and committed in another setting, but this was one of the few times I felt positive about being a "coyote," where mixture and hybridity and ambivalence could be a source of strength rather than a liability.

A couple of weeks later, I got a phone call from the dean offering me the job.