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El Sembrador Chicano – A Remembering From the corner of our eyes, we saw an old man. Grey hair, black shades, a black turtleneck shirt, black slacks, a dark brown wooden cane, smoking brown dress shoes, and a smile that was rare in his classrooms; we knew who this was. “¡Raza!” He called onto us. We approached, and in joy started a conversation about school. This was outside in the middle of Winter near Campbell Hall, a small corner near the North Campus Center where we would usually see Dr. Juan Gómez-Quiñones eat lunch with Dr. Reynaldo Flores Macías. His determined voice slowed down our fast-paced academic lives, letting us breathe beneath the walls of the ivory tower as students. Raza… A word of familial connection, of compassionate recognition at a traditionally white university at UCLA. Raza… An acknowledgement that we were seen. I first wrote about El Profe JGQ in a small dedication article for the UCLA student newsmagazine La Gente, titled “Remembering the Legacy of Chicano Historian Juan Gómez-Quiñonez,” published in 2017 to commemorate his retirement as a professor in the Department of History, a forty-year commitment at UCLA. I remember his celebration, a dedication to him and his work that brought together a large community impacted by El Profe in his fifty-two years at UCLA, as student, professor, and social activist. I remember the seeds he planted in my growing interest and consciousness in Chicana and Chicano history. I am not the one to write about the immense influence and character of the late Juan Gómez-Quiñones. I was entering UCLA at the end of his intellectual might and his work teaching the only comprehensive course on the long five hundred years of Chicanx history at UCLA. Yet, this was the course that changed my trajectory as an undergraduate student, obsessed with the political, cultural, and social particularities that El Profe brought to my own intellectual development. I cannot stress how much his work imparted in me his own sense of rigor in asking complex questions with the evidence, structures, and conditions we were faced with, of course with a longue dureé of historical perspectives. I remember his slow walks into the classroom, his kind voice asking for assistance, and his intentional markings on the chalkboard of dates, names, events, and the nuances of a history that turned spectacle in his passionate lecture of a topic. His command of a poetic history persistently captivated me, though sometimes I would catch myself dozing off—myself a tired student like most of us who were also student organizers. I am still haunted by his final papers, his course that required me and others to write what amounted to twenty pages of writing. This discipline and attention to detail, figures, and making connections to periodization within history are what I remember with a tender knowing that this was my own training for patience in my own work. I took the entire A and B series of El Profe’s “History of Chicano People.” I came out of it with a strong sense to commit to Chicanx studies at UCLA. I abandoned my sociology ambitions with the conviction that Chicanx people and their afterlives in the intellectual trajectory of the university were imperative. El Profe himself was not only an academic historian. He was also a poet, organizer, educator, and a transborder intellectual. Many of his own writings are in Spanish, either translated or not. His own liminal existence as a poetic thinker traversed borders and epistemic terrains to encompass a world larger than the Anglo-American university. One only needs to encounter his historical work on Chicano politics; his meditation on Marxian (Soviet) national questions; his books of poetry; his work on Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón; Mexican and Chicanx labor in the United States; Indigenous epistemologies of the Americas; and his monumental tome co-written with Dra. Irene Vázquez on Chicano Movement politics and aspirations to understand the depth of his intellectual reach and collaboration. El Profe JGQ was a giant. The passing of the late Dr. Juan Gómez-Quiñones is a huge loss that many are now writing, celebrating, and remembering: our reverence to El Profe is monumental, and he continues in our militant, scholarly, and poetic spirit. He sowed seeds of resistance, and we are flowering. * * * This piece was written some days after the passing and transition of Dr. Juan Gómez-Quinones, historian of Chican@ history and the borderlands at UC Los Angeles’ Department of History. His Chicano magic and materialist eye for historical rigor constantly reminds me of the work I must do in the position I now occupy as a graduate student. I don’t remember why this piece never saw the light, or perhaps its utility was supposed to see other ends. Regardless, I want to remember Profe and his magnitude. I want to remember his troubling of Anglo-American histories and his literary gentleness that persuades you to write like him. We remember. It was in those early years of El Movimiento that a conspiracy was being written, a form of heresy among Mexican Americans. Its name was “Chicano” and it forged a people whose destiny was to be never forgotten. To ancestor-warrior Juan Gómez-Quiñones, White Mountain Rabbit
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Here we post our writings of thoughts we have, essays we have written, poetry, social commentary, news reports, polemics, and other kinds of writing. We hold it valuable to our hearts the written word in the spirit of the huehuetlahtolli, and we aspire to be intellectually on point as well as accessible to our gente from the barrio to the academy. Archive
November 2022
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