Colorado College Bulletin

Writing Books on the Block Plan

By DOUGLAS MONROY, Professor of History

I learned some good words to explain why I write. I heard them with a CC class at Taos Pueblo, where I always find the dumb tourist questions fascinating. Probably expecting a profound spiritual answer, one asked our guide, who had been describing his ceremonial pilgrimages to the sacred Blue Lake, why he continues with such practices. The Taos man replied, "Well, it's something I do for my well-being."

Getting to write in the liberal arts college context has been an unexpected blessing: It has allowed me to write "for my well-being." In contrast to so many of my university colleagues whose tenure and promotion has depended on producing solid scholarly tomes -- those dense books with turgid academic prose and lots of arcane citations that obscure the narrative -- I have been able to write the way I want to. I don't claim that either Thrown among Strangers or Rebirth read like The Great Gatsby but they do use adjectives, adverbs, and metaphors, and I frankly inject some dramatic, funny, effusive, and poignant sentences and paragraphs to make my tellings about Indian, Spanish and Mexican California more compelling and accessible. An outcome is that students who are assigned the books fancy them, and when I browse through bookstores in California I see my works on the shelf. Not that they sell a lot, and once I found one on the sale cart, but there they are. Nothing makes me happier than to be giving a talk at some museum or library and have a shy, young student who's been reading Thrown among Strangers and who's probably only there because he's getting extra credit for attending my lecture, ask me to autograph the book, even when it's a used copy for which I don't even get the fifty cents royalty.

There is a fine line here between what is good for my well-being and what fuels some smutty narcissism. But I like having done something special; something that people will have read, liked, and grown from; to have striven to do, and dare I say, to have succeeded in doing, something splendid.

I began and ended Rebirth with lines of poetry from Simon Ortiz, the poet from Acoma Pueblo who has taught and lectured at CC several times: "It has to do with stories, legends/ full of heroes and traveling. It has to be with rebirth and growing/ and being strong and seeing." These words speak simply and profoundly not only about the life experiences of Mexican immigrants, but also about my own travels and troubles as I recreated their stories in my book. From the revolutionary anarchists of the Partido Liberal Mexicano, to the poignant and spontaneously organized agricultural workers unions, to the remarkable efforts of Mexicans involved in the New Deal-associated CIO unions, I tried to show how Mexican workers helped America to realize its values of equality and liberty.

I think I got this point across, or at least the book reviews say I did. Not only that, but my writings have come to affirm how Mexican immigrants have presenced themselves on the landscape of the Southwest and California, the land that their ancestors once appropriated from the Indians. I wish to make these lands home to the present-day immigrants whom the media and politicians call foreigners, or aliens, even illegals. But "it has to do with stories, legends/full of heroes and traveling," with other Mexican people I didn't know I would meet.

Researching my books takes me on marvelous adventures. I came to know the El Paso Shoe Store baseball team, Mexican middle-weight boxing champion Bert Colima, and cinema star Dolores del Río, among many others. The El Paso Shoe Store team, for example, proved to be the centerpiece of baseball in Mexican Los Angeles. In 1929 they played the Los Angeles Nippons for the "foreign championship of baseball." In the previous year the Mexican championship team from San Luis Potosí split a four-game series with the Philadelphia Negro Giants at White Sox Stadium in Los Angeles. Imagine that, all these teams playing one another. We can be sure who in the stands was rooting for whom; and the newspapers carried no mention of any troubles between these different groups.

The two most prominent Mexicans in the 1920s were Bert Colima, briefly the Mexican middle weight boxing champion, and Dolores del Río who, along with Ramon Novarro, Gilbert Roland, and Lupe Velez, established a strong Mexican presence -- a presence yet to return -- on the silver screen. The Mexican newspaper, La Opinión, called her "nuestra estrella máxima de la pantalla," and not only celebrated her cinematic achievements but chronicled her romantic involvements as well. An outspoken critic of traditional male-female roles, she proved to be a controversial heroine indeed.

I'm a rather pacific character, but I found myself cheering on Bert Colima's efforts and anticipating the results of his fights as I scrolled through La Opinión of the 1920s on microfilm. I read of his delivering "un punch considerable," and when "el noqueó" his opponents. I decided that it would be important for me to go to the fights, to go on a different sort of journey to see more of what this spectacle has been all about.

The several times I have been to the fights inspired my writing about the great Mexican boxers and their passionate and devoted fans. I knew of the fear and loathing and panic of boxing because I feared, loathed (including myself after cheering the knock out), and came alive when I saw pain and blood. To some degree this was a serendipitous encounter with new knowledge.

Mostly, though, "it has to do with stories, legends/full of heroes and traveling. It has to be with rebirth and growing/and being strong and seeing."

Doug's new book, Rebirth Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression, is published by the University of California Press.

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