NOTE: The interviewer s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets.

Transcription

1 ALBERT RAMIREZ. Born TRANSCRIPT of OH 1899V This interview was recorded on August 28, 2013, for the Boulder County Latino History Project and the Maria Rogers Oral History Program. The interviewer is Phil Hernandez. The interview also is available in video format, filmed by Liz McCutcheon. The interview was transcribed by Sheryl Johnson. ABSTRACT: Dr. Albert Ramirez is a social psychologist and has served as chair of the ethnic studies department at the University of Colorado as well as the associate dean of its graduate school and the associate vice chancellor for academic affairs. He also has thought deeply and published about Chicano identity. In this interview he explores his own background and that of his late wife Vera Ramirez and describes his experiences in the above jobs as well as his involvement with many other non-profits as a volunteer and board member. He reflects on immigration, ethnic discrimination, the Chicano movement of the 1970s, and social justice efforts. NOTE: The interviewer s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets. [A]. 00:00 Today is August 28th, My name is Phil Hernandez, and I have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Albert Ramirez. Let me share a bit about Dr. Ramirez. He is retired faculty from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has served as the Associate Dean of the Graduate School, Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs, he has chaired the ethnic studies program, Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethnic Studies. I hope when we get through in the interview he will share some other of his involvement academically as well as volunteer activities. The interview is being filmed by Liz McCutcheon. (Okay, let s go to the questions.) (Al, where were you born?) Well, I was born in Houston, Texas, many, many years ago. As you can tell from my beautiful lines on my face. 01:09 (Houston, Texas. Tell us a little bit about your extended family. Where your parents were born and how they came to the United States.) 1

2 Well, both of my parents are from Mexico. My mother was born in central Mexico in the state of Guanajuato. My father was born in Northern Mexico in the state of Coahuila, in the town of Piedras Negras, which is a border town to in fact, his backyard was the Rio Bravo, what other people call the Rio Grande. So he could look across the river and see Texas. Which of course at one point had been part of Mexico. Then the Mexican Revolution started. My mother was quite young. My father left Piedras Negras during the middle part of the revolution and came to Houston to work to support his family, because he was the elder son. Then my mother came, because she had been given away, so to speak, by her father to a general who wanted her hand in marriage, and he was much older. So to escape the embarrassment of refusing him she went to San Antonio to live with family and worked there in a hospital in the laundry room and then went to Houston and also worked at St. Joseph s hospital there in Houston in the laundry room. And eventually met my father. And the rest is history. (Very good. Okay. Tell us a little about your early education and your graduate work, etc.) Well, all of my education was in Houston. The first six years I went to a Catholic school, which had it s pluses and minuses. The pluses, I think for the most part outweighed the minuses. A lot of discipline. A lot of emphasis on education. On structure. I liked all those things. I didn t realize it at the time, but they really had an impact on my subsequent education. In fact, when I went to public school in the seventh grade for the first time, I didn t realize it at first, but after a while I realized that I was probably about two years ahead of the other students who had followed the traditional public school trajectory from grade one through grade six. I was doing things at Holy Name Catholic School that these students were just beginning to do now. Particularly in the area of mathematics. 04:20 (The neighborhood you grew up in?) Predominantly Mexican, Mexican American, some African American. Mostly the people in the neighborhood, most of the males in the neighborhood worked for the railroad. The Southern Pacific Railroad. Our house was two blocks from the railroad yard. That s where my father worked. At 5:00 you could hear the whistles blowing. That was the sign that everyone s day had finished. In those days, houses had front porches. You could sit on the front porch, and you could see all the males with their dirty overalls, greasy overalls, heading home. Including my father. So that was the neighborhood I was born in. It s called North Side Houston. My parents used to refer to it as El North Side. Most of those kids went to public school. Some went to Holy Name. Looking back, I realize the things that you learn when you re that age that you don t realize you learn until years later. And years later you reflect on that, and you begin to appreciate what your 2

3 parents did, the sacrifices your parents made in order for you to be successful and to get ahead. Even though neither of them finished elementary school in Mexico, they both pushed very strongly education. I was the youngest of the three kids, and for all three of us they always pushed the importance of education. (You went on to college at?) Well then yeah, so I finish Jeff Davis High School in Houston. Then I spent two years in the army. At that time they had a draft, and I decided to volunteer for the draft. I didn t want my education to be interrupted. I was kind of naive. I should have realized that I could ve received a college deferment, but I didn t think about that. So I volunteered to be drafted which was a two-year commitment. So for two years I was in the Army. The Army was a very valuable experience for me as well, because I saw for the first time, I think, the relationship between education and work, and style of living and quality of life. Many of the non-commissioned officers were people that I think saw the army as a way of life. As a more secure way of life as opposed to civilian life. Most of those were people of color. 07:55 (Mm-hmm. So you re now out of the Army and into --) Out of the Army, and then I returned to Houston. We were still living on the North Side, a predominantly Chicano neighborhood. And I spent the next nine years at the University of Houston. First receiving my bachelor s, then my master s degree, and then my doctoral degree in psychology. And I m living at home. I m living at home. So again, eventually, we did leave the North Side. I think my parents would have preferred to have stayed there, because even though we moved to another area of Houston, it was an English predominantly English-speaking neighborhood. So they missed the old neighborhood. And I always felt kind of guilty that in some ways we kind of pushed them out of the neighborhood they were comfortable in and put them in a neighborhood that they felt foreign. (When did you first come to the University of Colorado?) Okay. Well, then I finished my PhD in 1966 in the University of Houston. Then my first academic position was at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Believe it or not, even though my degree was in psychology, I had two academic titles. I had Assistant Professor of Psychology, and I was an Assistant Professor of Dentistry. And of course I knew nothing about dentistry. But there was a department called the Department of Community Dentistry. My primary appointment was at the dental school in community dentistry. We did a lot of work with respect to dental education. As a social psychologist, one of my areas of interest at the time was attitude change and behavior change. Then, what I tried to do at the dental school was to apply those principles to attitude 3

4 change, behavior change as it related to dental hygiene, dental care. Actually, I had a very successful career at the University of Alabama. I was there at a critical time. You know, today we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington. I was in Birmingham when Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. I saw the reaction of many people to that assassination there in Birmingham. There was a part of the city that I interacted with at the University that saw it as a real loss, but there was another part of this city that did not. It was almost two cities within one city. Anyway, I was there until 71, and then came to Boulder. I wanted to be in an area that there would be more Latinos. There were not that many in Birmingham, Alabama. So I applied to several places and Boulder responded to my applications. I came here in 71 and have been here ever since. 12:03 (What was your impression of the University of Colorado and the City of Boulder?) When I first arrived, I came here for my recruitment visit. As part of a two-day recruitment visit one of the things that you do the most important thing that you do is that you present your research. A colloquium. So, of course I was prepared for that. I was prepared for that. It occurred in the afternoon of my first day. Well, first, coming from Birmingham to Boulder, the altitude was quite a factor. So by the time the afternoon came, I was a little bit tired, but obviously working on nervous energy. I had to give my colloquium in the UMC on the fourth floor. So we went from the Psychology building to the UMC and the elevator wasn t working. So we walked four flights up to where the colloquium was going to be presented. I had just started talking or presenting my research. I was maybe about five minutes into it and the alarm went off. We had to evacuate the building. So we walked downstairs, because the elevator still wasn t working. And there had been a sort of a bomb. So we all went outside in front of the University Memorial Center. Waited for about twenty minutes until it was cleared. Then we walked up again four flights. So by the time I was starting my colloquium the second time, I was exhausted. But somehow I got through it. Somehow, I got through it. The next day, I met a lot of the Chicano students. It was a time even though I was going to be in the Psychology Department, I had asked if I could meet some of the students, some of the Chicano students. At that time there was a professor here who had very much the same name that I have, except that rather than Al Ramirez, his name was Sal Ramirez, and he was the director of the Mexican-American Studies program it was a program at the time. So we met, and I talked with his students. Right away, I saw that energy. It was the time of the student movement, the civil rights movement, the Chicano movement. All these things were going on. The whole aspect of Vietnam. So there was a lot of energy on campus. A lot of energy. And very different from the kind of environment at the University of Alabama in Birmingham at the time. I found that very compelling. Very energizing. So I went back to Birmingham, and I waited on the decision of the Psychology Department. Sure enough, several days later I received 4

5 an invitation to join the faculty. And I did. 15:54 One of the first things that I asked the department to do was to help me or give me support to create a course that I called Social Psychology of the Mexican-American. A cross-listed course between Mexican American Studies and the Psychology Department. The first time I taught it, it was a large class. I had about maybe sixty, seventy students. It was a three hundred level course, a junior-level course. I found that in doing the research for the class it really related to my research. My research had dealt with issues of power and pluralism and the way that these principles dynamics play out in social systems particularly in schools. As I began to do the research for my class and also looking at the context within the university in terms of what was happening at the university with respect to how the university was dealing with this influx of Mexican, Mexican-American students which was very different. Up until the sixties or so, even the late sixties, there were a handful of Mexican-American Chicano students at the university. That all changed in the late sixties and early seventies. To a large extent the university wasn t prepared to deal with that. And it dealt with it in some ways that created even greater conflict between the students and the University and then ultimately, in the middle, the Chicano faculty. So these were all the dynamics that were playing a part of the early seventies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In fact, you know later on, you think of generally of the Chicano movement as something that began in Denver with Corky Gonzales and the public schools there, but to a large extent as well, Boulder the University of Colorado at Boulder became a focal point of what became the Chicano student movement, because as more and more students of color began to arrive at the university, they protested the conditions at the University. The fact that there were very few Chicano faculty, very few black faculty. There were basically no courses in Mexican-American history and the same thing with black studies. These were very emerging disciplines in the early seventies, and again, very non-traditional. 19:39 So at the course that I taught Social Psychology of the Mexican-American is one that had never been offered before, because it didn t exist. No one was interested nor had basically the expertise to teach it. Because you didn t have academicians that were prepared to teach these courses and had the research background to look into the discourse within these fields. At the same time you had the student demands to have these courses taught. The real question then was well, who is going to teach them, and who should teach them? Who should have the decisions as to who would teach? And that became a growing dynamic as well between sometimes the University, the Chicano faculty and the Chicano students. Particularly as the students wanted to have a greater decision making as to the content and who would teach these courses. That was a very exciting time! (Very good, very good.) 5

6 (You were probably very involved in recruiting Chicano faculties to the campus. Do you want to share any of the ) Well, I became more involved with the recruiting once I went into administration. When I became the Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs. That was in the late eighties, early nineties. The nice thing about that position is that it didn t focus just on the recruitment of faculty of color, it focused on the recruitment of all faculty that office was responsible for. But within that, it was very clear that the percentages of the faculty that were of color was quite low, and also with respect to women. Those two areas, there was a gross underrepresentation. So that became a focal point in that position of attracting both women and faculty of color. So we developed a number of programs that were initiated primarily to try to recruit women in engineering and the sciences, particularly mathematics and faculty of color in general, across disciplines, because across disciplines there was that underrepresentation. Some of those programs, I am pleased to say, still exist at the university. (Did you find it difficult to attract faculty of color to the University?) Well, you know, you ran across this argument of lack of qualified people. I always thought that that was not a really a real argument. It was used as an excuse. Because once you create the incentives and you create a structure that faculty feel will be welcoming, then those other issues don t become as dominant. So you have to develop a university that women, faculty of color, and other underrepresented groups will see as welcoming, one that validates their research and encourages them to do research in their areas of interests. In the beginning, when we would bring it took a while. For example, if you had a woman faculty in women s studies doing research that was in many ways quite revolutionary in the field, and you had a faculty of color doing very non-traditional research looking at issues relating to people of color, initially, faculty, both male and dominant group faculty, didn t see those fields, those areas of research and study as having the same credibility as the quote traditional areas within the discipline. Quite often the faculty of color and the women faculty, they might have an appointment in women s studies or in ethnic studies, but their main appointment was in the traditional discipline Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology. Those were the departments that made the decisions with respect to their promotion and tenure at the University. So those were all so what I am saying then is that the university really had to look at itself it terms of saying what do we mean by excellence? To what extent are we willing to extend a paradigm of knowledge and extend it beyond what we were trained to do when we were students. When I say we, I am talking about the faculty in general. That was in some ways probably continues to be a growing process. 26:25 (Continues to be. So we re not there yet?) 6

7 Well, I think that s probably quite true. I mean, if you look at the university, there s still if you look at women faculty, for example, there s still underrepresentation in terms of full professors. It s the same with respect to faculty of color. There s an underrepresentation of full professors at that level at the university. If you look at the university and look at administrators, it continues to be predominantly white male administration. I think that I continue to be the highest ever administrator at CU Boulder in Academic Affairs, and I was an Associate Vice-Chancellor. So there s still a lot of dynamics interplaying and that reflect in some ways the overall society. 27:45 (I think you ve touched on some of this, but I m going to get a little bit of focus. You ve taken on the challenges of several very important political and civic positions in Boulder County and in the academic arena primarily. What motivated you to take on these issues?) Well, several things, and some that I have already alluded to. A lot was my own personal experiences growing up. I think one of the areas, one of the reasons I became interested in social psychology was because within psychology, social psychology looks at the whole area of stereotyping, discrimination, relations between racial groups. So that was one of the things that interested me in social psychology. But that goes back to my own personal experiences, both in high school and in junior high school. Actually, my very first day in school at Holy Name there was this little Chicano kid sitting next to me. And his name was Jose Juan. And the nun, Sister Mary, wanted to know our names. So we each went saying our names. So it came to me, and I said Albert, andthen he was next. He just sat there. So the nun says, What s your name? and he just kind of sat there. Finally, I realized what the problem was, so I said to him in Spanish, La monja quiere saber como te llamas? The nun wants to know what your name is. He says, Oh! Jose Juan! So Sister Mary kind of responded, and said, you know You don t speak English? No hablas inglés? No. So anyway, the class went on; everybody gave her their name. And after a while I realized there was this stench in the air. Everybody started kind of laughing after a while, because they could smell it as well. And I looked at Jose Juan, and I could tell he was real embarrassed, and I thought maybe he had expelled some gas, but then I realized that he actually had defecated in his pants. He looked at me, and in Spanish he said, Tell the teacher that I had to go to the bathroom, but I didn t know how to ask. And I saw the embarrassment. 7

8 So the teacher had him go out and clean himself. He wasn t there the second day. And looking back, I remember that that was the only time in my six years at Holy Name that I was allowed to speak Spanish. That experience had, you know, quite an impact on me. It made me realize the impact of being different. 31:43 So all of those and more other experiences led me to the field of social psychology. Then coming here and seeing the students that were here from different parts of Colorado, the first time removed from their families, in many ways not having the kind of support system they needed in order to compete and do well. Quite often coming unprepared by an educational system that had low expectations of them. And in some ways, sometimes they having low expectations of themselves and the impact that it has on self-esteem and self-worth. So all those issues had an impact on me. Then, probably the most important impact is I had the great experience of marrying a very social activist person. And that was Vera. Vera was very active in the community. She at one time was the only person in Mexican-American Studies who was on the staff including faculty and the administrators. Because at one time no one wanted to be the chair of Mexican-American studies because of the conflict that was going on. She was their champion. I learned a lot from her in the sense of caring not only for students, but caring about the issues of the Chicano Community in Boulder. She marched with the students even though she could have been fired against the protests at the University. She was a staff person. She was bringing them food at a time when they had taken over the Dean s office. So that level of commitment and of passion had a tremendous impact on me. In fact, I doubt if we would be sitting here today if it were not for the impact that she had on my life. Both professionally and personally. Because that same passion she continued to have throughout the rest of her life and As you know, in particular, her great passion was to serve food to students of color. For nine years Domingo en Casa [Sunday at Home] she was the person who initiated that program. We would have students, particularly students of color, particularly Chicano students, but students in general, who would come to our house on Sundays, and she would prepare the food for them, because she realized that they were away from home for the first time and that Boulder was a difficult place to be, for many of them, the campus was a difficult place for them to be, for many of them. So this was a home away from home. Over those nine-year period we probably had eight or nine thousand students, faculty, community people, students in the K-12 system come to the house. She was the architect. So she was probably the greatest motivator. She kept me grounded. She kept me grounded. Sometimes as a faculty member you have a tendency to remove yourself in some abstract sense, from the real world. With Vera you couldn t do that. You had to be grounded and be very much a part of what was happening. 8

9 36:25 (I recall that both of you, you and Vera, were very active politically in the Democratic Party.) Right, yeah. She was a precinct chairperson for several years. She was very much involved in politics. And, again, I think it had to do with her own upbringing. She felt that one of the principles that geared her life was the whole notion of social justice. She was very much committed to the whole notion of social justice and would do what she could. For many years she acted as an advocate for Mexican children in the Boulder Valley School District that were having problems in school. So the parents would be called. The parents didn t speak English, so Vera would be called to act as an advocate. She did that out of her own desire to be of help, but also with the experiences that she had had in elementary school as well. Because she, when she first started school, her dominant language was Spanish having been raised in the San Luis Valley for the first six years of her life. So all of those things kind of interplayed, both professionally and personally, in my life. 38:22 (I know you said you had to hurry from your volunteer work with Meals on Wheels today so we could make the interview today. What other programs are you also involved in in a volunteer capacity? Now or in the past.) Well, I ve been involved with Hospice in fact, up until recently. I continue to see this beautiful lady who was my first Hospice assignment. She s in a nursing home in Brighton. So I go to see even though she is no longer a Hospice patient, because she has outlived that six-month period, and she s doing she s in a wheelchair, but she s doing fairly well. She s ninety-one years old. Her name is Maria. I go see her every week. We have a nice conversation. Sometimes she s very articulate. Sometimes, not as much, but I go visit her on a regular basis. 39:31 I just finished teaching a nine week class at for Intercambio, at Boulder High School. The students that I had were primarily from oh, I had students from Cuba, Mexico, Columbia, Brazil and South Korea who wanted to learn English. I found that very exciting. I love the classroom. The only thing I miss about the University is the classroom, the students. The politics, the faculty meetings and every thing else, I don t particularly miss, but I miss the students. Then I m also on the board of Su Teatro in Denver, which is a local theater that focuses on the Mexican-American experience. It is the third oldest Chicano theater in the county. The first one is Teatro Campesino in California, Luis Valdez, and Su Teatro is the third. It recently celebrated its fortieth anniversary. They put on some very contemporary plays. Many of them depicting the Mexican, Mexican-American experience. 9

10 So being on the board I became kind of inspired by the plays. So the last three years I ve had three writing projects that I ve been working on in various stages of completion. And one of them is a play it s a musical play which is something I ve never done before, because in psychology you write to publish in journals. So this style of writing is very different. The title of the play is Remember El Alamo. And it s a play on words on the very famous slogan Remember the Alamo. The creation of that slogan was because of what it was a revenge in terms of Sam Houston s revenge at what had been a defeat at the Alamo a month earlier. So when he would try to get his troops to charge, the crying in slogan was Remember the Alamo, remember that we were defeated there. This play, Remember El Alamo, is basically looking at well, what about the Alamo that existed before the invaders from the North, if you will, chased out the Mexican soldiers who were protecting it. Because in American history, it makes it look like the people who came from the United States, this was their place, their Alamo. They were defending the Alamo. In reality, they had just taken over the Alamo three months earlier. One of these days, I hope to have that play produced somewhere. So I m in that process of writing as well. 43:30 (And the other two?) The other two the one that is now on SmashWords.com and you can also find it in Barnes and Noble. It s an e-book, an electronic book [ Now in paperback, published by Lulu Press]. And it s called The Profe Files: Social Psychological Perspectives on Power, Pluralism and Chicano Identity. It pretty much is a compendium of the research that I ve done over the years on those issues of power, pluralism and Chicano identity. In some ways it s also an autobiography of my K-12 experiences in Houston. Because what I try to do in my classes is I try to relate whatever social psychological concepts we re talking about, I try to relate them to concrete events. So, in talking about them, I would relate from my own personal narratives. My own personal experiences. One of the things that I would have the students do is to tie these concepts we are talking about in class to their experiences. So it has some kind of meaning to them as well. So the other thing that the book focuses on is a brief history of the Chicano student movement, as I talked about earlier, at CU Boulder, starting in the early seventies to the mid-seventies where you had the two bombings that occurred in Boulder at Chautauqua and at Public Liquor Store, which doesn t exist anymore it s where 29th Street Mall is now. That involved some students from CU that died in those bombings. And it deals with, again, the issues that I talked about in terms of the University s experience with Chicano students and how they tried to respond to that. And the experience of faculty, Chicano faculty, in the early years at CU. The character in the 10

11 book is a guy named Profe. Interestingly enough, Profe is a Social Psychology Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who also went into administration. So it covers a broad range of things. So that s finished. It s out there. And then the other one, when my wife Vera passed away in 2010, I spent a year, a little bit over a year, putting together a manuscript that I called Vera s Gift [Current title is Vera s Journey: Across Generations and Beyond Borders, available as an e-book, Barnes &Noble]. It consisted of two parts. The second part deals with her story. The first part deals with the history of her family. It goes back in that part, part one, the history of family, relates to what you are doing now on this project. Because as I read about a little bit of the background of the project as it relates particularly to Boulder County, it seems to particularly focus on the last one hundred and fifty years. If you look at Vera s story, she and her ancestors, it s a process that goes back centuries. Centuries. And it s a journey, if you will. If you look at the present Latinos that live in Boulder County, for many of them, their history goes back more than one hundred and fifty years. If we look at the way that history is taught in most schools the history of this country the focus is the original thirteen colonies and then the movement westward. So historically, the lessons are the expansion of the United States from the east coast moving west. Go West Young Man. The spirit of the pioneers and taming of the west. 49:10 So historically the emphasis has been from the westward movement with very little emphasis on the very fact that to a great extent this country was also based on the movement south to north. And that movement started in Mexico. So Vera s family even predates Mexico. Her family came to Mexico from originally from Spain, and then Portugal. And they left both Spain and Portugal because of the Spanish Inquisition. So one of the things that I discovered in this research was that her family had Jewish roots. They left Portugal in 1590 and went to Mexico to the New World you know, part of the Spanish empire. But eventually, there, they had to escape the Mexican Inquisition. But because of all the records of the Inquisition, it made it somewhat easier for me to trace the history. Because these were all recorded as a part of the Inquisition. Her relatives were part of a very famous expedition that left Mexico that was led by a person by the name of Juan Oñate. That expedition eventually went from the heart of Mexico to Santa Fe in the [1600s]. In the [1600s], her ancestors were a part of the expedition. They were part of the later on the revolt that occurred by the Pueblo Indians. They chased the Spanish people out after about sixty years. Then later the Spanish returned and re-conquered that area. Then over the next hundreds of years there was that amalgamation of Spaniards and Indians. So, as I look at her family history you realize that a) Vera was the thirteenth generation to be part of Mexico and actually a part of New Mexico and Southern Colorado. They lived in Southern 11

12 Colorado up until in the San Luis Valley until 1946 when they moved to Denver. So again, another kind of a stereotype that s kind of out there is that the Mexican is a late arrival. A late arrival into this country. There s the depiction of the Mexican as a foreigner. The reason for that is our complete exclusion of looking at this part of the world, this part of the country and it s development from the South to Boulder County. To Boulder County. And the very strong impact that the descendants of all these families had in the trajectory of that civilization and continuing civilization. And it has some very important contemporary implications as well. 53:37 Right now you have this whole issue of the border and what do with the border and immigration. Part of the issue that we don t address is that whenever a nation by a dictatorship, by military action with another nation, draws up a new border as a function of victory, that border, by any definition is going to be artificial. It s going to be artificial in the sense that it creates boundaries that before that conquest did not exist. And they re artificial. And you see that in the Southern United States-Northern Mexico, which for thousands of years people went back and forth, back and forth, because there was no border. The reason you have it as an issue now is because that border that exists was one that wasn t created because of merger of civilizations or of tribal groups. It s a function of military action. And my belief is that when a nation does that they have a responsibility and an obligation to look at that that they have created, artificially, as they deal with the peoples and the civilizations whose life they changed and, in some ways, even destroyed. 55:44 I think that s probably a part of the problem that is going on in the Middle East is the creation of borders, of nations, across tribal groups. So anyway, I think we need to put greater emphasis on how this country developed and the impact and the contribution, particularly in what is now the Southwestern United States, of the Spanish migration. Of the intermarriage between Spanish and Indian. The creation of the Mestizo people. And the fact that to a very large extent, we are mixed. Vera s family, Jewish. The Jews lived in Spain for you know Spain was under the rule of the Moors for eight hundred years. Well, you know that the Jews, there must have been some kind of intermarriages with the Moors. With the North Africans. Many people quite often will say, No, we re not Mexican, we re Spanish. As if Spanish has some magical purity to it. Well Spanish is Spaniards have all of these different genetic pools too, including the Moorish and Northern African. Then her family comes to this to the Western Hemisphere to the Americas. You have those generations interacting with the Indians of Mexico, with the Indians of New Mexico. You have this wonderful interconnection and genetic diversity that unfortunately, quite often we want to deny. And that s such an important dynamic because once you begin to deny part of who you are, you re denying your heritage. 12

13 (Good. Treating some really important points. Thank you. Thank you.) 58:26 (Let s come to Boulder and Boulder County. What do you see as, and I think you ve touched on some of these, but what do you see as the most pressing issues for the city and for the county as a whole?) Well, it s hard to separate what s happening in Boulder Country with what s happening in the nation. In the country as a whole. I think that some of the more important issues as I see them is we still have the very great issue of economic disparity. Economic inequality. And quite often, that economic disparity is a function of race and gender. I see the country becoming losing that middle class and going more and more and more people going out of the middle class. At the same time that we re creating more and more billionaires, we re creating less and less middle income people. I really see that as a very important issue across all areas. I fear what we are doing to our mother, Mother Earth, and the resources that she has given us since the beginning of time. And what we are doing with those resources and how we are using them. I think those are, you know, really important questions. I think there s the issue of loss of trust, in many cases, in terms of the people who lead us and believing what they tell us. You know, you see that happening now in many current affairs. The issue, for example, of right now as to whether we should go into Syria. You re hearing the very same arguments that you heard several years ago from our political leaders as to why we should have invaded Iraq. In the eyes of many people at least, you re saying Gee we ve heard this before. The first time it turned out to be not true. Is it true this time? We doubt, we doubt our political leaders. That says a lot about who we are once we begin to question those who we ve put into positions of trust. I see those as very important questions for now and for the future. In terms of who we are not only as a city, not only as a county, but as a nation. The extent to which we re willing to be responsible for those who do not have the resources that we have. I see a growing movement where people see themselves as not being responsible. Where our government feels that we re not responsible for those who need help. Whether it be the elderly, whether it be people who need Medicaid, who need Social Security, and where quite often we want to take the position: Well, we ought to privatize those things, and make them for profit, and put them in the private sector. Once you put those services into the private sector the private sector is out for one thing and that s for profit. I don t believe that health should be for profit. So again, what are our areas of responsibility as a nation, to ourselves, and to our fellow citizens? 63:37 (With your history of involvement in the affairs of this community, the academic community, 13

14 you have obviously developed a personal and professional philosophy. Will you discuss this philosophy and how it s guided you in the manner in which you address your leadership role?) You know when I was I m going to go back to North Side Houston. I think I told you earlier, my father worked for the railroad for The Southern Pacific Railroad. He would come home late at night. Tired. He d take a bath. Then, when it came time to put me to sleep, he would usually be the one who would tell me stories. Thinking back, I was pretty selfish because even though he was tired, once he started telling me a story, I would and he started falling asleep I was still wide awake, and I would kind of you know push him to finish telling the story. They were always in Spanish. He would tell me stories about the little man in the pecan. It was a magical pecan. Whenever you bit the pecan, a little man would pop up. And he would say, Que manda mi amo? Master, what is your command? So Juanito s father on his dying bed gave this pecan to the son, and he said that this little man will always do what you command if it s for the good of the community. If it s for the service of human kind, and it s not for selfish gain. Of course, Juanito didn t know what that meant, but he said, Okay. Well, his father died and soon afterward Juanito bit the pecan, and the little man would pop out, and Juanito would ask him to do things. Well, in time, he learned that some things the little man would not do, even though it was something Juanito wanted him to do. And then later on, he realized it s a good thing that the little man didn t comply. Well, those are the stories my dad told me about what the little man in the pecan would do. So he would make up these stories in which there was good and there was evil. There were poor people who needed help. And the little man in the pecan would help Juanito. Over the years, as he told me these stories years later I realized that he was telling me his own personal philosophy. And his personal philosophy was that we are all our brother s keeper. That you never judge the character of a person by the amount of wealth that he or she has, by their status; that you treat people with respect. Those were all the themes and all the stories that he told me, even though as a little boy I didn t appreciate them. I appreciated the action that was going on. It wasn t until years later that I realized the impact the impact that those stories had on this little boy. Me. Growing up. Plus seeing my own mother and father and the way they practice living their own lives. 68:00 (I think you ve answered the next one, but who has been the single most influential person in your life and why?) Well, when I was younger, when I was a kid, it was my mother and father. To some extent my older brother and sister, because they did very well in school and I tried to, you know, compete 14

15 with that image. But after, as an adult, there s no question that the single most important person in my life was my wife Vera. She has an impact, continues to have an impact, on me in everything I do when I reflect on the kind of person that she was. (What issues continue to be of interest to you, and how do you intend to address these issues in your future?) I think I ve mentioned quite a few of the issues that are important to me. I will continue to be engaged in activities that I think promote a sense of service to the community. And you know, my volunteering will continue. I plan to volunteer for another organization here working with international students and bringing them to come to CU the ones that come to CU and serving here as a host family. In a way it s a continuation of Domingo En Casa, but with international students. So I continue to want to be engaged in that. I will, now that I finished these three writing projects, I want to put them to bed in some way. To me, one of the most engaging processes that are of critical importance to me is to be able to write down my thoughts. So I plan to continue writing in some way and deal with the kinds of issues that I ve talked about over the years and put it out in some way. I do believe that the pen is mightier than the sword. Although I guess now you would say that the computer is stronger, or the keyboard is mightier than the sword. (Are there any issues that you would like to mention that we haven t touched upon?) Well, you know, I can t think of any. I mean, we ve covered quite a broad spectrum of issues. I ve appreciated the opportunity to discuss them with you. I appreciate your being even interested in listening to them. (I think we can both share the opinion that you ve enlightened us in a lot of areas that we have not thought about and the depth of which you went into many of those areas. We know that there s other subject areas that we could touch upon that you have a wealth of knowledge on, but we ll maybe catch those next time.) All right. Well, I ll look forward to it! (Very good. Thank you.) [Videographer] (Thank you.) 72:06 [End of interview] 15