I came up fighting and surviving. I came up expecting to be good at what I did and wanting to catch up, get better, to be better. To not talk it but do it. Where I was, wasn’t where I wanted to stay.

I started working at thirteen because I needed money to take care of myself. Making my own money was my own power, my own independence. I worked through high school and through undergrad and grad years where I fed my starving brain. Soon a husband and father, I worked in construction for sixteen years, mostly as a high-rise union carpenter. I wrote stories when I could. When I published a book of fiction that won national literary prizes, change dropped on me suddenly. Though the only courses in English I’d ever taken were the required freshman ones at junior colleges, I became a professor in a well-established and high-quality mfa program. As a student, with no family money support, working, I’d focused on surviving and catching up with other students who always seemed to have gotten their skills and knowledge genetically at birth. Now a professor of graduate writing students, I saw how few like me there were. With my new job, I decided I would let a couple of Chicano students, dreaming of becoming writers, audit my mfa workshop. That got me yelled at loudly, the recognizable roar that preceded getting fired at any construction site. I relented by starting what we called the “illegal, undocumented workshop” that met weekly at my Austin apartment, outside the university’s vigilance. (Three of those went on to publish notable books.) In time, more brown students began applying and entering the program. But with system, history, dominant culture milieu and money and mores, I decided to go another route.

My writing career was doing fine (e.g., multiple times in The New Yorker). My life template had changed though. It wasn’t just my own battles and survival anymore. I became we. Do what for others what was never done for me, for you, for us. Build ladders, throw ropes down, and we climb over walls.

I considered moving on to big name universities. Good for me probably, as a play in new academic vita game for writers, but they were even less my world, not much better than what I already had as a job. And probably fewer students from the neighborhoods I knew. Then I interviewed at the University of Houston, Victoria, a school not on anyone’s map—a tiny college with oil endowed literary ambitions at the time, in a region that was first an outpost in New Spain, and then Old Mexico, until it became Texas. South Texas, where UHV was, is what I would still call Chicanolandia. The small undergraduate student body was close to 70% Mexican American, 25% Black. At the interview, when the then president asked me if there had ever been an HBCU type of college campus for Mexican Americans, I decided to push my chips all in.