From the Editor: Estelas en la mar

Abstract

From the EditorEstelas en la mar John Nieto-Phillips (bio) Caminante, son tus huellasel camino y nada más;Caminante, no hay camino,se hace camino al andar.Al andar se hace camino,y al volver la vista atrásse ve la senda que nuncase ha de volver a pisar.Caminante, no hay caminosino estelas en la mar. —Antonio Machado Long ago I embarked on a journey, which set me on a path that, through a mix of serendipity and divine intervention, resulted in this publication. I had the great privilege to launch Chiricú Journal in the Fall of 2016. This venture, made possible through the collaboration of scholars from around the globe, has been one of the most fulfilling endeavors of my career. More important, though, Chiricú Journal is a legacy of those who paved the way for this and other Latinx journals. It is with paternal love tinged with saudade that I pass the editorial baton. As I reflect on the path I have traveled, I appreciate just how fortunate I have been to find community, purpose, and belonging along the way. ________ Eighteen years ago, on a winter morning, I sailed east from New Mexico in a U-Haul van. Recently tenured at New Mexico State, I had accepted a job at Indiana University teaching Latino history. I was an academic migrant but fancied myself an intrepid voyager pressing the outer boundary of my comfort zone. I’ll stay a couple of years, I thought, then hustle home with tales of my adventure in the Hoosier state. [End Page 1] Those first frigid months I studied Bloomington like an anthropologist, listening, observing, taking notes. As I passed bunches of chattering spray-tanned students, what struck me most was not the predominant whiteness of this Big Ten college town, but the glaring absence, in public spaces, of Brown people or the sounds of tongues other than English. When I arrived in 2003, Latinx students comprised a tiny fraction of IU’s undergrads (about 2.5%); whereas, at NMSU (a federally recognized Hispanic Serving Institution), they exceeded a third of the student body. In Las Cruces, from the lectern I would gaze upon a sea of young scholars eager to learn and talk about their own history. But in Bloomington, I anxiously scanned the roster and lecture hall for Latinx names or faces—to little avail. I had anticipated Indiana would be less diverse than other places I had lived, but my plunge into Hoosier homogeny was like landing in another country. America’s heartland was, to me, a hinterland. I longed to find community with other Latinx scholars. And one fine spring day, I did. ________ “¿Qué húbole?” preguntó Luis Dávila with a glint in his eye and a mischievous smile. The slender, spectacled professor of Spanish had a quixotic air about him. Born in San Antonio during the Great Depression, don Luis studied chemistry at St. Mary’s before pursuing a PhD in Latin American literature at Ohio State. He had spent over three decades in Bloomington and, I soon came to learn, had pioneered Chicano-Riqueño studies at IU. In the 1970s, he and a group of students produced a wide-format magazine titled Chiricú. Replete with poetry and fiction and artwork, the publication reflected, in some measure, the diversity of the campus’s Latinx population. In launching the magazine, “CHIcano, RIqueño, and CUbano, and other Latinos” sought to address fundamental questions about their identity and lived experience in the Midwest; and through their collaboration they formed a tight community. “No matter where a hometown or pueblo may be,” they explained in the magazine’s first issue, “we have put down roots in both Spanish and North-American culture, and the two mingle and work together. So we bring our double world, the people and places that were our origins, and our experiences of North-American life, to Bloomington, Indiana.” As the magazine grew in circulation, contributions in English, Spanish, and Portuguese flowed in from the US and abroad. Over the course of thirty-six years, Professor Dávila and his students published twenty-six issues of...