How Latino Stories Shaped the U.S.: Insights from Dr. Nicolás Kanellos

Episode Transcript
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(02:30):
gether Kombam the biling What Podcastorias Sinzansura Jose Bam yell Leoi.
We have a conversation with doctor Nicolas Canelos. Doctor Canelos
is a Brown Foundation Professor of Latino Literature at the
University of Houston. He's the founder of Recovering the US
Hispanic Literary Heritage, established in nineteen ninety two to recover

(02:55):
and make accessible all the written culture of Latinos. In
What became the United States from the fifteen hundreds to
the present. It is the largest humanities research program dedicated
to Latino history and culture. He's the author and compiler
of some twenty books, including the first comprehensive Anthology of

(03:16):
Latino Literature and Thought and No Travos and Tolohia The
Literatura Spana de luss Tonos. It is Yeah, the Anthology
of Hispanic Literature of the United States, Latinos in Nationhood,
Two Centuries of Intellectual Thought, Hispanic Immigrant Literature, and Sueno

(03:37):
del Returno, and Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States.
His latest book is a monumental reference work Latino Firsts,
Trailblazers and Milestones in the United States History. Doctor Canelos
is a director of the largest Latino publishing house in
the United States, at the Public Opress. He received Anderson

(04:01):
in Bird Lifetime Achievement Award from the North American Academy
of the Spanish Language. Was elected to the Spanish Royal
Academy for Arts and Science. President Bill Clinton appointed doctor
Canelos to the National Council on the Humanities, and in
twenty twenty four, President Joe Biden awarded doctor Canilos the

(04:22):
National Medal for the Humanities. Obviously, after this bio, you
know you're in for a treat. It was a pleasure,
a joy, and an absolute honor to be able to
interview doctor Canelos. I think I would have loved to
have four hours with him, just to ask him about

(04:45):
all of the things that he's lived through and witnessed
and his passion for preserving our stories and so it's
it was such a joy. So I won't delay that
is any longer. Here's my conversation with doctor Nicolas Kanelos.

(05:08):
Welcome to Katakpam. It's a pleasure to have you.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
Cam as it goes to start a conto. I'm really
pleased to be here. Thank you for inviting.

Speaker 2 (05:19):
Me, thank you for being here, and thank you for
sharing your story. So the first question we always ask
is what is your heritage?

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (05:28):
I am Puerto Rican and on my father's side Greek
linage on my mother's side.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
I mean, it's everything, it's all the things.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
Right, It's it's Spanish, African, Indian, French all together, which
is kind of a cosmo a compositive Puerto Rican culture.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
I guess, yeah, for sure, and many Latinos, you know,
like it's we're all a nice coming, nice soup about things. Right.
So let's take us back to a little bit to
the beginning. So you've always been hungry for knowledge, you

(06:12):
always have, Like you started reading, you were exploring books
and finding them and finding ways to to learn and
learn more. When did you realize you wanted you had
this passion for Latino culture and covering our stories.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
I think that began to grow in high school, and
that really matured in college. It started in high school
because of course I spoke Spanish, and I was pushed
into Spanish classes like many of us are, and I

(06:52):
of course I did very well in Spanish classes, even
though you know they didn't accept my dialect.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Yeah, of course, you know.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
I was proud of my family.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
But I didn't see it reflected any place in the
school curriculum, in the teaching, in the classes, in the books,
all of that.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
And that only intensified in college.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
But all alone, there was this juncture between because I
went back and forth to Puerto Rico and New York
and New Jersey all along, there was this juncture where
there Puerto Ricans and Latinos in New York and New
Jersey were always looked down upon and were marginalized and

(07:41):
in fact the subject of yellow journalism, always attacking US
as criminals and drugies and everything else, when on the
other hand, in Puerto Rico had complete society.

Speaker 3 (07:54):
You know, Puerto Ricans were.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
You know, governors, they were policemen, they were firemen, they
were teachers, they were professors, they were lawyers, and you
didn't see any of that back in New York and
New Jersey or Jersey City or New York City. Right, Yeah,
it was that the only place for us was as
in criminality and and.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
Juvenile delinquents, you know.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
And so when I went to graduate school again following
this trend, because I spoke Spanish, I was encouraged to
become a Spanish teacher. So that was my plan as
an undergraduate. And then I went to graduate school, my
plan was to become a Spanish professor, professor of Spanish,
you know.

Speaker 3 (08:43):
But again there was nothing there. There was nothing that reflected.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Latinos in the United States, nothing that would say we
had a heritage here, nothing that said, you know. And
I went to University of Texas for my PhD, master's
and PhD studies and it has the largest Latin American
collection in the United States mm hmm, and very few
Latinos for Puerto Ricans were to be found in that collection.

(09:10):
This was back in the late sixties and early seventies.

Speaker 3 (09:14):
You know, there was.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
Material in Puerto Rico, but not for Puerto Ricans Latinos
in the United States and part of part as part
of US culture.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
Wow, you know.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
And at the same time, I was working out in
the community in the civil rights movement, and I was
performing with a theater group in that followed the example
of Luis Valdez and the Theatri Compsino, and it became
very clear to me that there was a long tradition
in the communities, a theater of literature, of culture.

Speaker 3 (09:52):
You know, and discovered all of these things out.

Speaker 1 (09:54):
There, but they never made their way into schools and
libraries and into museums and in to the depositories of
a quote unquote American culture. So was in graduate school
when I really started doing the heavy research to find
that that legacy, that heritage.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
So we could say that the lack of representation is
what gave you the hunger to find those stories, because
it's almost like as if you were working alongside all
of the people doing these things, but nobody was telling
their story exactly.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
Yeah, So when I got out of graduate school, my
buddy and I started a magazine specifically because there were
all of these writers around and artists around, and they
didn't have any place to publish. So we started releaseda
Chicano Ricana. That was in nineteen seventy two. We got

(10:55):
together and started it, published a presition in seventy three
and became a forum for the kinds of things that
we were looking for people to find and recover and
to celebrate and to incorporate into education. And from there,

(11:16):
eight years later or seven years later, we started a
publishing house and consequently today it's the largest and oldest
Latino publishing house in the United Say. It's out the
political press, and we have this big project that follows
my dream, that's called recovering the US Hispanic legacy.

Speaker 3 (11:36):
Right, and we find, we research, We have been researched.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
Since nineteen ninety all of the documents and writing created
by Latinos in the United States. We find them, we
digitize them, and we have found hundreds of thousands of documents, testimonies, diaries,
published books, newspapers. We have the largest collection of Spanish

(12:00):
language newspapers, some two thousand published or nineteen forty five.
I mean, it just goes on and on this iceberg
that was out there, that was completely ignored.

Speaker 3 (12:11):
You know, the many reasons historically for why.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
Our legacy, our history, our contributions were ignored. And this
show is too too long to go into all the
reasons why we were marginalized and forgotten about it.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
And it makes me curious given that you grew up
and you talk about the civil rights movement and how
things were really hard, how the stories were raised, omitted excluded.
Do you see a correlation with the times we're living
in now and like you live in Texas and so

(12:48):
how do you see that reflection?

Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, yeah, I see that. What I recognized back in
the sixties and seventies was a historic development of United
States conquering lands and peoples of the Spanish speaking world,

(13:11):
and a deliberate emphasis on Americanization using a melting pot
theory that everyone would forget about where they came from,
what languages they spoke, and become American. During the twentieth century,
that was the purpose of the EDUK of public education

(13:32):
to blend all these people into an American, not an
Italian American, Portuguese, American, German, American, etc. But American only
speaking English blah blah blah.

Speaker 3 (13:43):
Right.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
So that was a long development as a consequence of
the policy of expansion and conquest that made the United
States what it is today. But today, in a short
period of time, what we have is real political movement

(14:04):
to disenfranchise people of other cultures and what they consider
it to be other races. I don't believe in the race,
but they consider them to be other races or coming
from to use the president's term, shifthold countries. This is
such a lovely president to use that kind of language,

(14:28):
and it's very deliberate. So the government in a very
very very very short period of time is going after
everything in government and education that will represent the diversity.

Speaker 3 (14:43):
That has made this country strong. Mm hm.

Speaker 1 (14:46):
You know, they just want to impose one model of American,
one religion for America, for the United States, you know,
and it doesn't include us.

Speaker 2 (15:01):
Right, And this is the way your work is so important.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
Hopefully, hopefully we'll have readers. Hopefully we can continue to
get our books and our knowledge into the curriculum everywhere
from K through graduate school as well as out to
the general public. Sure, but right now it becomes intense
because the things that we have been researching, writing about,

(15:28):
and I'm not I'm talking about my work has been
mostly as a collaborator, as a a convener of scholars,
working with lots of teams of scholars to do all
this work right.

Speaker 3 (15:41):
And so.

Speaker 1 (15:45):
Hopefully what we have been working on for all these
years since the sixties will not be erased with one
one government turned an office, unless that that government decides
to stay beyond its lead legality.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
Which it's looking like he wants to.

Speaker 3 (16:05):
He has said his hairs set as much.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
Yeah, So I mean we can we can totally go
into derail ourselves into into that. But I want to
talk about your Latino First book. So you have over
a thousand Latino firsts that have done incredible things, and
of course on the cover we have many people that

(16:30):
we know of that their stories have been become global.
But you also cover some things some people that I
had no idea about. And I'm looking at my notes
because I want to make sure I quote them correctly.
So what we have felicit does Mendez Mendes versus Westminster

(16:53):
in nineteen forty six, So felicit does Mendez along with
her husband Gonzalo, they let a landmark civil rights case
is that ended the jeor school segregation in California.

Speaker 3 (17:03):
That's correct.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
Their victory of late important groundwork for Brown versus Board
of Education and made California the first state to segregate schools.
Everyone knows about Brown versus Board of Education, but not
a lot of people know about Mendes versus Westminster. And
so how do you view that legacy and in today's

(17:25):
education movements, especially with all the band books and all
of the erasure that is currently happening. I mean, like
that's all the museums, right.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
Well, Mendos versus Westminster was just one a number of
legal antecedents that Latino's brought to the Supreme Court and
other courts to fight the segregation. And they were cited
specifically by Brown versus Board of Education in coming to
its historical.

Speaker 3 (17:58):
Decision.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
And you know, there were other cases on integrating jewelies,
for instance, and well there many many others.

Speaker 3 (18:09):
So what Mendez and.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
Others really are a history that began in the nineteenth
century of Latinos trying to become part of the United
States by doing learning American ways of protesting and gaining
the rights that they were supposed to have as born

(18:33):
in the United States, and that legacy has lives on
today in a lot of the laws that were passed,
including laws for bilingual education for instance, many laws that
look upon it as a civil right.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
You know, the language you speak is a civil civil right.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
You're loudness, you know you have a human and civil
right to speak the language you were born with.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Right see in less panora look at it exactly.

Speaker 1 (19:01):
So what's happening today is that there's there are attempts
to reverse all of that, including the one basic right
that it came out of the Civil War that empowers
all these other rights for people of Latino or immigrant extraction,

(19:24):
et cetera. And that law is birthright citizenship. After the
Civil War, laws were passed by the Congress and signed
by the President that said anyone born in the United
States would be considered a citizen have all the rights
protected by the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. Now,
if we chip away at birthright citizenship, as the President invites,

(19:48):
President and others want to do then that erases all
the other rights that we enjoy, the right to vote,
the right to sit on juries, the rights to be
confronted by a peer in accusation and in a trial,
you know, the right to.

Speaker 3 (20:09):
Speak your language.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
You know, there is because this country has been a
milange of all different cultures from the beginning.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
From the beginning.

Speaker 3 (20:22):
Immigration is not a recent thing.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
From the beginning, it was impossible for the United States
to choose a national language, an official language, you.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
Know, that's what We didn't have one for a long time.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
Right, And in the nineteenth century, bilingual education, for instance,
was common. There was great Swedish English education in Minnesota,
and Polish English education in New York, and even Basque
English in Idaho. You know, it was all of this,

(20:57):
and during World War One they started to retrench try
to fight all of this diversity because they were especially
afraid of the Germans as enemies, so they started outlawing
German language and schools, et cetera. And that spread to
some of the other languages. But in the constitutions of

(21:20):
the states of Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Colorado, California, and New Mexico.
New Mexico wasn't split off yet into New Mexico and Arizona.
They all say that the language had to be respected
and preserved, you know, as well as you know, the
culture and so on and so forth. That was the

(21:42):
treaty with Mexico. But also it happened in Louisiana and
Florida too, which had Spanish speaking backgrounds. So these these
are integral laws to the history of the United States
that are being attacked, you know, and that account for
us as human beings. Mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (22:03):
So that's what's happening.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
Yeah, I hate to be on the negative, you know,
on the what And I started writing doing all this
before this happened, before these administrations, you know, I was
totally yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
You know, like even before, which takes me to the
next story of Alonzo Berrales, which I think we can
tie that in with with the the language and the visibility.
So Alonzo Berrales was a Mexican American lawyer, among the
first Mexican Americans to practice law in the US. He

(22:39):
co founded lu LAC, which still exists to this day.

Speaker 3 (22:43):
The largest hit civil right yeah, uh.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
Huh is the League of United Latin American Citizens, the
oldest Latino Civil Rights Organization, and they drafted its constitution
and helped defeat anti immigrant legislation. And so I think
while the times that we're living in are really hard,
and we can see the attacks in the Latino community

(23:07):
like everywhere every day, every day. I mean, I'm seeing
every day people. It's more frankly, it's more people reporting
than the news reporting. But I see reports of people,
mothers being picked up by ice, dropping the kids off,
people just going off to work or living their life

(23:27):
without doing anything wrong. And I think we can look back,
and that's why I think your book is powerful, because
we can look back at people that are like us,
that we're going through something similar back in time, which
it's one of those like history foreheating.

Speaker 3 (23:44):
Itself, Oh right, of course.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
Large the largest deportation of Latinos in the United States
took place during the Depression, when Mexicans and Mexican America
were rounded up summarily by the local authorities and by
the church churches and put on trains and sent to

(24:09):
the border and dumped there. That's known as the repatriation
mm hm. It followed large scale, broad national propaganda against
immigrants who were quote unquote stealing their jobs right during
the depression, and that has served as a model along

(24:33):
with the concentration camps that during World War Two the
United States started for the Japanese Americans. You know, so
these two models are what are being looked back to
by this president administration, both repatriating quote unquote or deporting.

(24:53):
They just say deporting. Repatriation was a sugarcoating yeah, deportation
during the during the depression.

Speaker 3 (25:04):
But now, I mean it's ballfaced deport them and it.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
Doesn't matter that they're you know, the port whole families,
doesn't matter that there are citizens in the in the family,
what have you, and create these large concentration camps like
in what is that called Alligator in Florida, Alligator Alcatraz
that they're starting in Florida and other ones in South Texas.

(25:29):
They're immense. They and the Congress just gave them billions
of dollars to build these concentration camps. I mean, we
just need to look back in history to see.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
This, right.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
Yeah, back then in the depression, community people and labor
union people, et cetera try to fight this, but what
were what happened to them?

Speaker 3 (25:52):
Many of the leaders were reported just like that.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
And that has always been one of the things, right
because many of the congress people who protests against immigration
really are the protectors of illegal immigration because they get
their money from the farmers, the big industrial farms, the industries, etc.

(26:21):
That hire the illegal quote unquote illegal or undocumented immigrants
to keep them enslaved state. So while they're out of
one side of their mouth they're yelling against immigration, on
the other side, they want the illegal undocumented immigrant to
be available to them to work for cheap in polluting

(26:44):
the lands and soils and rivers from their slaughter houses
and from their industrial farming techniques, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (26:54):
So it's a ruse. They love immigrants.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
They love them in the fields, they love them in
the open heart, they love them cutting down sugarcane. The
same kind of conditions that were existing under slavery. If
you protested back then, you got whipped or hanged. Today,
if you protest or do something, you get reported.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
Or detained. There's a lot of leaders organizers that are
being detained. Yes they are un lawfully just because they
raised their voice and they said this is wrong. It's
we're living through heavy times. But I think what grounds
me sometimes I as I look at the reality of

(27:39):
this moment, I look at history, I look at what
other people have done before, and what they've lived through
and how they've overcome it, which I think, going back
to representation and learning from our stories, this is why
it's so important.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
Yes, in fact, that's it.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
We can see at every step in our history and
the United States resilience and regeneration. Sometimes we have to
take you know, we're forced to take two or three
steps backwards, but then we recover grounds, you know, and
so that these stories in Latino first are examples of

(28:18):
us being persistent of doing what it takes to overcome
and for coming back.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
For sure, I was thinking as you were, as you
were sharing, how do you see the youth you're you're
a professor, and so how do you see your students
reacting to this and and what do you tell them?

Speaker 1 (28:39):
Well, I'm a little isolated because I just teach PhD students,
and most of the PhD students, A good number of
the pH systems, maybe ninety percent, come from Latin.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
America, which is another big thing.

Speaker 1 (28:51):
They're all scared, they're all very scared that they in fact,
during the summer break bunches of them did not go
home for summer vacation. They stayed because they were worried
they couldn't get back into the United States to continue
their studies. This is horrible, you know, for the whole world,

(29:12):
because we basically were teaching the world about democracy and
everything else, you know, everything the way our country runs.
And consequently, everybody wanted to come here to study in
our great institutions.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
And now we're attacking the institutions.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
We're cutting off the immigration, We're not We're making it
difficult for foreign students to come here and learn about
our culture and thus go back to their countries and teach.

Speaker 3 (29:38):
Them what we're really about.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
I mean, it's I mean, every form of communication is
being affected by these policies for sure.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
So to bring it back to the book and your work,
was it hard to narrow down the stories? I mean,
you have over a thousand, but.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
Well it was hard to find the information in the
first place, you know, Like when I started doing this
back in the ninetes, nineteen seventy, nineteen eighties, for instance,
nobody knew they were they were latinos and sciences, So
how do you go about finding who they are?

Speaker 3 (30:16):
What they are, what they have contributed totally.

Speaker 1 (30:19):
So what I had to do was I went to
the libraries and I looked at the scientific journals and
who was writing it, and then I got the subscription
lists of those journals, and then I got lists of
the association memberships of the sciences, and then I wrote

(30:41):
letters to all of them and asked for their vitas
and their photos.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
Wow, and they answered they sent them information.

Speaker 4 (30:52):
Right.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
So that's what I had to do with the scientists
because no one had ever written about Latinos and science.

Speaker 2 (30:58):
So you really had to dig through. I had to
write that's wild.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
Yeah, So that's that was the extreme, right, others is
a lot of the other information is because in my
generation there was the first large generation of Latinos.

Speaker 3 (31:15):
Going to college.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
Yeah, so by the time I was doing this work,
there were a number of Latino researchers and professors doing
research and publishing books and articles, so I could read those.
I knew how to get to hold of all of that, right,
But otherwise, what I was doing throughout the whole process,
throughout the eighties, nineties up until the present, practically was

(31:40):
reading all of the Latino magazines, reading all the Latino
newspapers finding a name that was mentioned and trying to
track them down.

Speaker 3 (31:50):
And and as of.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
The mid nineties, the internet Internet became helpful, but it's
not really really super helpful until maybe ten years years ago,
where you could just push the name in and then
everything comes up right. But before that, you know, it
was like, you know, subscribe to Latino, subscribe to Hispanic Executive,

(32:12):
subscribe to his you know whatever, and look for the names,
see who's being covered, you know who's doing what. And
that's what I had to do for many, many, many years.
And now, of course it's a lot easier. It's also
easier I have to pest because the Internet in places
like Wikipedia, Yeah, they use my books.

Speaker 3 (32:36):
I use my books.

Speaker 2 (32:38):
Wow, that's wild. See you've done the work for the
Internet pretty much. And then it makes me think because
hearing your research and you did by name, so I think,
like your name, your last name is Greek, right, and
so I wonder how many stories of Latinos were also

(32:59):
kind of buried because they had they were multicultural.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
Absolutely, there's so many. If you look at this book,
if you go down the table of contents, you will
see last names that are English, orient Jackson for instance. Yes, German, Dutch, French,
you know, all over the map, right.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
One thing that has been constant about Latino culture, and
maybe this is also Spanish culture because of the mixtures
from the career, from the Mediterranean and Africa.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
We blend.

Speaker 2 (33:35):
We blend.

Speaker 1 (33:37):
We didn't develop a resistance to missagenation, that horror that
was used in the United States in the nineteenth century
and has somehow sometimes survived missagenation. They thought that was,
you know, impure. Oh, recent politicians have been talking about

(33:57):
us poisoning their blood.

Speaker 3 (33:59):
That's the same concept.

Speaker 2 (34:01):
So we bring it back to the caste system that
the Spanish is to Latin America.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
But you know when when when the Spanish published those
paintings of Castas.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
Clara were all the different mixtures. Yeah, it had already happened.
They couldn't control it. Yes, So from then on.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
From the seventh sixteen, seventeenth century, what is a Latino.
It's someone that does not resist other cultures and other peoples.
We blend, we mix readily. You know, We're not like
other cultures that we know, some of them. I won't
mention from Northern Europe.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
Which is I think where we're pulling kind of like
the current administration is pulling from.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
Its racist cultures, seeing other races as the interior and
to be limited and fenced off from the truth, from
the true people. And that's what what empowered American expansionism.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
Manifest destiny.

Speaker 1 (35:04):
Manifest destiny was an ideology developed in the early nineteenth
century that said that the peoples of northern Europe were
meant to govern the world and to govern over all
the other And this is a term that was used
in the US Congress to govern and control the bastard races. Wow, yeah,

(35:26):
so so much.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
You know. I often think about you can have seen
las Yo, Mexico or not. And my partner is a
white man from the Midwest, and we often talk about history.
He studied history, and I tell him the history that
I learned, which is not inherently right, but it's very
different to the history that he learned, you know. And

(35:53):
when I talk about the caste system and how we
literally saw the poster or we went through the poster
and they really so when the Spanish came and then
they talked about they started creating all the casts, he
had no idea, like that's not something that people cover

(36:13):
or the history books cover here, and so it's fascinating
to also to your point of us being a mix
of cultures also how we bring in our experiences into
the adaptation and accepting the fact that we are all
so vastly different. But at the same time we are

(36:33):
right now we're being scrutinized because we just simply look
a certain way or not.

Speaker 3 (36:38):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, unfortunately.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Yeah, So what's your hope with Latino firsts and with
your many books that you've written, but this one is
the one that is currently on rotation.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
An earlier version of Latino first was used like like
uh Hispanic serving colleges institutions.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
Nice.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
They were using it to prepare kids for competitions, you know,
where one college would send the team and and and
and challenge another college. They had this This was all
organized to see who would win, you know, a trophy
at the end of who knew more about like you know, history.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
And so they were using my book.

Speaker 3 (37:32):
To prepare them.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
That's awesome.

Speaker 1 (37:34):
So you know, I hope that this finds some popular usage,
you know like that, and I hope that that just
the information gets out. Also, like some of my books,
what happens. People steal, People steal the information, you know.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
Because it's so it's it's research based.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
Sometimes they steal the whole thing and they put it
online and they call it something else, like like I
think one was one was called La Plaza Latina or
something like that.

Speaker 3 (38:02):
You clicked on it and it gave you this whole
chronology that.

Speaker 1 (38:04):
Was my chronology with all the different practically using my words,
et cetera, you know, completely plagtarized.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
Did you reach out.

Speaker 3 (38:14):
The information is getting out there?

Speaker 2 (38:17):
I mean I guess no, Yeah, but that's not right.
Do better?

Speaker 3 (38:23):
Well? If if it, how can I put it? There
were different tackled books.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
Yeah, but the purpose of this book and the purpose
of a couple of my other books is to get
the information out there so people, not only Latinos but
non Latinos will will find that these things are in
the air. These are what made what made us as Americans,
you know, like that we take for granted. What were

(38:51):
the three crops introduced by the Spanish mestizo mulatos into
the you know, Nited States, but became the backbone of
the industry throughout the South and Southwest.

Speaker 3 (39:04):
Sugar cotton and livestock.

Speaker 1 (39:07):
What would Texas be without livestock, you know, cattle, sheep, pigs.
What what would Louisiana and Florida be without sugarcane?

Speaker 3 (39:19):
What would you know, Uh, cotton.

Speaker 1 (39:23):
The cotton industry is gigantic in Texas and Arizona and
New Mexico and the South. It's what would what would
the history of United States be without cotton?

Speaker 3 (39:34):
Yeah, we take that for granted.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
Community property comes from laws that filtered down from medieval
Spain through Mexico and into the laws of Texas, New
Mexico and Colorado and California. We wouldn't have we couldn't
be file a joint tax return with our you know,
husband and wife if it weren't for these concepts that

(39:59):
came out of Spananish Mexican law. Impossible by law treating
adopted children as natural born children who can inherit and
all that kind of stuff that comes from Spanish Mexican law.
You know, the right of women to inherit and own property.
In the nineteenth century, English common law did not allow

(40:21):
them to fully benefit from the property of her deceased husband. Yes, right,
but Spanish women not only you know, Spanish Latina Mexican
women could own property, they could be businesswomen, they could
do all kinds of things. And guess what they got
to keep their names they didn't have They didn't become

(40:42):
the property of their husbands. They didn't have to wear
their husband's brand all the time. Yes, you know, these
are things that we take for granted that are part
of the national culture, and they don't know where they
came from. They came from us.

Speaker 2 (40:57):
Like, it's so frustrating, you know, to hear that, the
rhetoric and the narrative that it's being told about why
Latinos are like invaders when we actually helped build this country.
And so what would you say to someone who is like, yeah,

(41:18):
the portom Well, it's a very loaded question, I know.

Speaker 3 (41:26):
Oh oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
That is the same attitude when that that that Hitler
said when he said there's a Jewish problem, mm hmm,
and this is the way you can solve it.

Speaker 3 (41:41):
That's very, very similar.

Speaker 2 (41:44):
And it's wild to see how people don't see it.
The blinders that people have and they just only choose
to see things from one lens. And I believe, I mean,
why I do this work to share our stories, to
share different perspectives to engage in in conversation instead of

(42:07):
fighting each other. It's also I think important.

Speaker 1 (42:11):
It certainly is so wonderful that you have this program.
You know, this is you know, we need you know,
we need fifty more of them. Yeah, yeah, you know, otherwise,
you know, it's it's very hard even for me, you
know who I you know, I run a publishing house.
I'm a professor, but it's even hard for me to

(42:31):
get the word out about this information.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
Yes. Yeah, So you have this Latino first book. It
has over a thousand people in here. When you were
going through all of the names and all of the
accomplishments and all of the things, was there a disappointment
that you were like, oh, I couldn't find someone who
did this. So who do we need more of?

Speaker 3 (42:56):
What?

Speaker 2 (42:56):
First are not in the book? We need to show up?

Speaker 3 (43:02):
Yeah. We don't have a governor of Texas, New York
and New Jersey Hill, Florida.

Speaker 1 (43:08):
Wow, we don't have a president of the United States.
M okay, yes, and because of Jerry Mandarin, we're going
to have hard time keeping our people in Congress. Yes,
so let's start there, you know. Yeah, And finally we
got a Supreme Court justice. That was a super first

(43:31):
one one one in the whole history of the United States. Yeah,
so you know, we've been in here, been here a
long time, so we've been here before the United States.
So yeah, that's that's the most obvious ones, you know.
But otherwise I think we have representation in so many

(43:52):
different fields in the book, so many. Yeah, everything from
medicine to astrophysics, to astronauts to you know two two
uh tech too. Technology. You know, the founders of Sprint
for instance. You know, Sprint used to be the big

(44:12):
thing in technology. Yeah, yeah, CEOs of airlines, CEOs of corporations,
CEOs of you know, at the point, at one point
the world's largest corporation, Coca Cola. You know, we have
people who have gone, who've made it, who've done, you know,
marvelous things. But of course they don't realize. People don't

(44:36):
realize that these accomplishments are there and have been part
of making the US what it is.

Speaker 2 (44:40):
Yeah, I'm looking at Nita Marita Sindron, chief of Space
Medicine at NASA, Thenillo, the first Hispanic immigrant woman in
NASA's Academy of Lead Engineer Academy and lead engineer from
Mars Rovers Robotic arm So that story is she arrived
with three hundred dollars and then she became or she

(45:04):
hosted the first ever Spanish language NAZA broadcast of a
Mars landing.

Speaker 1 (45:12):
There that's the other thing in in Latino. First the
place of women, the leadership of women, the accomplishments of women.

Speaker 3 (45:21):
You know, right from the rhythm the get go, it.

Speaker 1 (45:26):
Does the stereotypes about women in general and Latinas in particular.
You know that Latina political figures and and and labor
organizers and and and and industrialists and everything right from
the from the early nineteenth century doing the marvelous things.
You know, and then you know there's continue to be

(45:49):
confronted with all of these stereotypes. This undoes that hopefully
if you get you know, you get to see you know,
it's not an anomaly when you see a women's thing
or a photo, it is not.

Speaker 3 (46:01):
It's a stand.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
Yes, I agree. So I'm not going to ask you
who's your favorite story, But because it's like when somebody
asks people ask me all the time, who's your favorite guest,
I'm like, come on, it's like asking a mother who's
your favorite child? Right. So I'm gonna ask you a
question about the stories, but before, let's take a quick
coffee break, which we haven't. We're after all, we're at Kafakompam.

(46:35):
So doctor Rincols Nicholas, what are you do you drink?
Are you drinking coffee right now? A? Yeah, I'm drinking tea.
I'm drinking tea. So it's in the afternoon. It's a
little bit later for you since you're in Texas and
so it's not time for coffee anymore, but it's time
for a witha in my case, I'm drinking tea. But
do you drink coffee?

Speaker 3 (46:57):
Yes? I drink about three or four cups in the morning.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
Wow, that's a solid amount.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
My wife is very religious about the coffee beans she buys.
She buys the whole and she mixes them herself. Then
she grinds them herself, and she has, wow, really good
coffee machine.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
You know, it's nice. So you get the good good
in the mornings and you drink like the four plus
cops of coffee that you drink in the morning are
from your house.

Speaker 3 (47:26):
Or do you from the house?

Speaker 1 (47:28):
And when I go to the gym, I'm taking I'm
taking my my from.

Speaker 3 (47:32):
The house, you know, right from the house.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
Nice. How do you drink your coffee?

Speaker 3 (47:38):
Black?

Speaker 2 (47:39):
Straight up? Just how it comes? Nice? Awesome. On my end,
I'm drinking tea with a lot of herbs. I'm not
gonna mention them because there are too many. But that's
kind of like my afternoon drink, and it helps me
sustain energy. Instead of drinking coffee, I drink tea and
it doesn't Hm, it's not tea with caffeine. Actually, it

(48:03):
has ginger and lemon, grass and various herbs that give energy.
But it's not necessarily caffeine because I'm I'm committed to
not overcaffeinate myself after I did for a long time. Okay,
so let's get back to the show. So I'm curious,

(48:29):
not necessarily who's your favorite story, but is there a
story that you that you found that you may or
may not have doesn't have to be in the book,
but is there a story that deeply moved you that
you remember They're like, you know what this one is
like tugged at me?

Speaker 1 (48:46):
Well, you know, there are so many stories of coming
out of poverty, you know, and and facing all kinds
of barriers and then failing you know, and maybe because
of similar backgrounds or facing some of the same things.

(49:08):
Sonya so to mayors rise from from the Bronx, which
was known as one of the most depressed poverty areas
in the United States back when she was growing up,
and there were you know, buildings were being trashed and
there were just one vacant lot after another, mounds of breaks,

(49:31):
et cetera. And she came out of that background and
was able to get a a superior education and then
ultimately land at the Supreme Court.

Speaker 3 (49:42):
I wouldn't say land.

Speaker 1 (49:44):
Making her way to the Supreme Court is you know,
it's really an inspiring story, you know, for everyone. And
I think I hope kids pick up her books, you know,
her children's books, and they can you know, helps to
fight despair and helps to to reanimate, even if it's

(50:05):
a myth, you know, that idea of the American dream
that you can make your way. I believe that, you know,
that people can make their way. I don't believe that
there is any there are any children that cannot learn,
but I believe you know others, you know, any to

(50:27):
say there are disabled children, But I think that all
children deserve a good education and I believe that all
of them can achieve, you know, and we have one
thousand and one stories to prove it.

Speaker 2 (50:41):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
Rising from the fields like Joseernandez, who was a mic
was from a migrant farmworker family, going back and forth
from Mexico to California with the crops, and eventually the
teachers asked, said the family should settle down. They did,

(51:04):
and he made his way through college and became an astronaut.
And what it took for him to become an astronaut.
By the time he made it, he was so old
it was just about to be too old to be
an astronaut. But he had repeated and repeated and struggled.
He did everything that it would take to become an astronaut.

(51:24):
If he was afraid of water, being a land bound
crop picker, he was not a swimmer.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
It was far from the ocean. He was afraid of water.

Speaker 1 (51:36):
But he had to learn to scuba dive, and he
had to learn to go down into the deep water
and salvage equipment, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (51:45):
So he did it.

Speaker 1 (51:47):
He found out that on the satellite on the space station,
it was shared with Russians and it would be an
advantage if someone spoke Russian, so he went and he
learned to speak Russian, everything, whatever it took. And we
that story is not unique.

Speaker 3 (52:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:05):
So many of our of our achievers have done whatever
it takes, whatever it takes to achieve and to make
that important for the community because one in all of them.
I think this is also common about Latinos. They see
what they're doing as advancing the community, and they see

(52:25):
where they're at as a community endeavor. They didn't get
there by themselves. The community was helping and pushing them
and behind them, starting with the family community and then
going out to the broader community. It goes against this
ideology in the United States as a self made person.
We're not self made. There's so many people who contribute

(52:47):
to what we do, who we are, etc. But Latinos
have had this idea about family and community, and it's
repeated even.

Speaker 4 (52:56):
In books that we publish in our the publical press.
We have a book called Latino Leaders Their Monologues, Interviews
with Latino Leaders and how they got to where they are.

Speaker 1 (53:08):
Almost every single one of them says family community.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
Latinos are community made for sure. Yeah. Yeah, and I
think we carry that it's a through and through line
for a lot of Latinos, regardless of the country of origin.
That it is often even I see it with my
clients who are from all over Latin America. And community

(53:34):
care is something that's very much embedded in our core.
And I agree with you that everything we do is
it's more so to benefit everyone because historically we've been
excluded so much that when we create, I mean, look
at your work, you know, like you're sharing the stories

(53:56):
and I think this is a narrative that frankly would
and it's to be pushed more. How our work is
not just to benefit this country, and it has been
for a long time, but also when Latinos show up,
communities get better. Like I will own this that we
moved into this neighborhood is very white and now everyone

(54:17):
waves at us. We started saying good morning to people,
and so I will. I think we can own that
to say, where we show up, things do genuinely authentically
do get better because what we do is for us
to improve our circumstances.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
When no doctor Canilo's Nicholas, tell me where we can
find you, Where we can find the book, where people
can learn more about your incredible work. I mean you
have a medal of on or not the President Biden
gave you.

Speaker 1 (54:56):
Yes, it's the National Humanities Medal became in October twenty.

Speaker 2 (54:59):
Four, the National Humanities Metal.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
Yeah, I mean it's like it's an honor to be
able to talk to you. But tell us where we
can find you.

Speaker 1 (55:09):
Okay, you can better bookstores should have first, but you
can also find it on Amazon, and you can find
it directly at Visible ink Press online. You can know
directly from the publishing house. And other books that I
have and at the publical books are at artiepublico press
dot com, so they're easy to get.

Speaker 3 (55:31):
So yeah, I'm not hard.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
To find, yeah, for sure. And we'll have all the
links in the show notes shared on there, and I
will make an invitation for listeners to request Latino first
and the local library. That would be great because the
helps authors grow their books. And when we request the

(55:52):
local libraries, recussing books and local libraries is really helpful.
So if you want to read it, I think it
should be available at every local life library. So go
to your local library and ask them to bring it.

Speaker 3 (56:04):
Yeah, I think the young people junior high.

Speaker 1 (56:08):
High school students would really benefit from this, as well
as college students, but just families.

Speaker 3 (56:13):
They can sit.

Speaker 1 (56:13):
Around and page through the books and say, oh, I've
heard of this person, or I knew that person, etc.
Oh they're from this Yeah, they're from our own town here,
you know, right.

Speaker 2 (56:27):
Well, even like for me when I got the book,
I was flipping through it. Obviously, frankly, I didn't read
the whole thing. But it's one of those because I
don't know if it's meant to read from one in
one sitting. But it's one of those books that if
I need inspiration, I can literally open it up and
like if I'm feeling down, for example, I just opened it.

(56:49):
A'malia Pees nineteen fifty six. She became the first Latina
artist to win a major award in the US, first
Prize at the Golf Caribbean Art Exhibition at the Museum
of Fine Arts in Houston. So she was an artist,
you know, and so that could like allow you a
music inspiration. There's so many categories, and you know, it
can just be it's one of those like give me

(57:11):
the message, let me flip through it and see what
I need to hear today. It's great. Last a few questions.
Do you have a remedy you want to share with
us a remedy?

Speaker 3 (57:23):
Read?

Speaker 4 (57:24):
Read?

Speaker 3 (57:26):
Read?

Speaker 1 (57:27):
Don't just don't just stump through the telephone. Don't just scroll, Yeah,
just don't scroll. Actually read and read books, read magazines.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
Read real books.

Speaker 1 (57:41):
Yeah, people are forgeating that the deep, deep understanding and
learning comes from reading, not from scrolling.

Speaker 2 (57:49):
Mm hmmm. And reading long. I was gonna say long distances,
but reading longer than a minute video, you know, mm hmm,
exactly because because I noticed. So it's sad now that
people's attention span is between three to seven seconds. And
I noticed when I like, I love books, so I like,

(58:11):
these are my currently reading books. Those are there? And
when I sit down and I like, I put music.
Can I make sure I set myself up for success
to read? I notice I've counted. Actually sometimes it's twenty seconds,
and I'm like distracted. You know, my brain immediately wants
to be like, what else can we do? It's not

(58:33):
only a practice, but it's a practice that needs to
be practiced often.

Speaker 3 (58:38):
Absolutely. Yeah, I can actually say reading saved my life.

Speaker 4 (58:44):
Hmmm.

Speaker 3 (58:46):
You know it did, and not only saved my life,
that made my life. So what can I say for sure?

Speaker 2 (58:52):
And you make things for us to read now, And
do you have a quote or mantra that you live
by right now? I don't think so, M like even
something that you may have read or I don't know
right now.

Speaker 3 (59:05):
Well, my man, don't give up mm yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:10):
And and and my staff at the publishing house and
my students.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
It's always like, don't give up, keep going. I love that. Well,
thank you so much for coming to Kaambam. Thank you
for sharing your work and your story and for your
all the things that you have done to make sure
that our stories are being shared and known in the world.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
Thank you so much, maam. It's been a pleasure. It's
a really great conversation.

Speaker 2 (59:39):
Thank you, thank you, Thank you. Buena listeners. I hope
you enjoyed this conversation. I had truly a lot of fun.
I felt it was special. This this interview. I truly
think it's one that needs to to be preserved as

(01:00:02):
the work that doctor Canilo's has created and done and
continues to work on. Frankly, is so powerful and so
necessary for us to remember all the things that our
people have gone through and continue to go through. Let's
not forget that we are still in the fight. And

(01:00:24):
I think for me it was really it was reassuring.
It gave me a lot of hope and a lot
of inner fire to remember that everyone has a way
to contribute, and doctor Canilo's chose to contribute by preserving
our stories literally and so now there's many of places

(01:00:49):
and like you heard in the bio, I mean, he's
just done so much. So I think it was It
was a powerful episode for me. I hope it was
also for you. I would love to know your thoughts,
your comments, drop comments, if you're watching on YouTube, send
a DM or screenshot and tag on the socials and

(01:01:12):
tell me but you think about this episode because it's
not often that I get to interview an elder such
as doctor Canelos, and I liked it. There's so much
to explore. Thank you so much for listening. I'm so
glad you're here, truly. Stay Shining. Compamis created by our

(01:01:37):
small mighty team. Content production by Nancy Himis, podcast management
by Marulnadin, social media and marketing by Brenda Figero and
Meet your host BAMC. To keep the cavacito brewing and
the healing flowing Join the Supporters Club for only five
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(01:01:59):
by and exclusive minnesotes you won't hear anywhere else. Screenshot
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going with us on social media at Kapa compumpodcast because
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(01:02:22):
and Facebook. Grasias for listening to Kafa coombum as, spread ideas,
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