Chapter 5 - Precolombian Legacies and Indigenous Presents in the History of Mexico; Or How to Find Other Possibilities within Constitutive (Post-)Colonial Violence: A Conversation with José Rabasa

Summary

The Training of José Rabasa.

FGH: What are some important moments in your training? BA in Philosophy and Literature from Universidad de las Américas (1971); MA in Philosophy from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1978); PhD in the Program of History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1985). What would you like to remember now?

JR: I may want to remember my interdisciplinary orientation at the beginning. It was literatura and philosophy intimately connected. My work in Mexico was frustrated at the graduate level. This was due to a series of grotesque situations. I had to let that go or rather I could not find time to make it work. I was doing my MA with Ramón Xirau who underwent a paranoia after an intimate friend of his, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at UNAM, was assassinated. A very tense situation was created. He almost walled himself in his house and you had to go to see him and it was not easy to get in. I don't know if we could make it public, but I am answering your question. It is important in the sense that I had to leave it behind. My CV registers a thesis that I never defended for various reasons. It was impossible. It was 1978 and I had been completing my graduate studies at UNAM since 1971. Several things happened: I obtained a post in Morelia at the Universidad San Nicolás Hidalgo, which got interrupted for the writing of the thesis. I spent several months trying to structure the defense of the thesis that never happened. The possibility to go to Santa Cruz came up. Instead of waiting in Mexico for another semester seeking the possibility of defending the thesis, I left it behind. Santa Cruz had important changes. There was a very interesting group. Hayden White had arrived. James Clifford was beginning to work on the history of anthropology. In connection to the colonial Latin American context, Jorge Klor de Alva was also there. This was an interesting trio. In the field of Latin American literature, Marta Morelo Froschi, whose suggestions and interventions were very useful, was also there.