The worst part of writing is editing. Here is another passage I cut from the book I am working on:

“The year 2014 was dominated by the theme of privatization and events in Mexico. Language became a tool for understanding what was happening as well as a barrier. In academe in past thirty years we had passed through major fads such as post modernism and different ways of looking at literature. The meaning of words had changed. As one gets older you tend to remember stories as a form of entertainment instead of teaching. No one likes to be lectured. As a child I loved hearing my relatives tell stories about the past. However, it was not until I was older that I realized that the stories meant something; they were key to understanding the present; and why we were what we were – they distinguished us. As my awareness increased, I became serious about the past — so serious that it often got me into trouble.

Through the story the historian emits emotion without lecturing. How can a person write about lynching and injustices and not get emotional? The story was like a personal relationship, which should mean something. Maybe I was getting older but I was drawn “Back to Bachimba”—the title of Enrique “Hank” López’s article published in the Winter of 1967 in Horizon and three years later in a longer version in American Heritage Magazine. López was troubled that his father was the only private in Pancho Villa’s army when everyone else’s’ relatives were non-commission officers or officers in Pancho Villa’s army – his father was the only private in Pancho Villa’s army.

During this period in which Tucson and UNAM competed for my thoughts, “Back to Bachimba” brought me back to reality. Certainly Villa was an icon however I remembered Camargo, Chihuahua where families still remember the story of several dozen women who Villa executed in 1916 when they challenged his shooting their loved ones.

The lesson was to never romanticize Pancho Villa, the Mexican Revolution or even the proletariat. Guiseppe Di Lampedusa about the decaying society in Sicily brought to mind Sonora and its people. The harshness of the land reminded me of parts of northern Mexico where the harshness of the land formed the norteños’ character. This sketch helped me to understand the differences between the behavior of Villa’s troops when they entered Mexico City and contrast it to that of Zapata’s troops. Tucson also took on a new meaning.

My approach to history was forged not only by friends like Hank López, the movies, and activism, but it was also formed by the classroom – both as a teacher and student. The point that I am trying to make is that history is ubiquitous; it is not learned in the library but it involves living. Life teaches you that the good are not always right and the bad are not all wrong. Institutions such as the Catholic Church also have opposite poles. By and large it has not been the champion of the poor; however, there are instances where its contribution to justice has been vital.
El Baruyo (Barullo). Context in Understanding History

Context is everything in understanding what happened in the past. It is difficult to understand the sixties without the proper context even if you lived through them. Much of what was written overly relies on oral histories or war stories we had heard. Living through the decade did not guarantee that the participant knew what happened. Even newspapers and documentaries are often as opinionated as oral interviews.

The sixties were an awakening for me. They were an escape from the fifties that were stifled by the army, marrying young and hustling a degree, as well as working 40 to 60 hours a week and carrying 16/18 units. The sixties’ baruyo (the commotion, the disorder and the chaos) seduced me. I was the last one leaving a meeting because I thought I was going to miss something.

Los Angeles in 1950 was the whitest major American city (78 percent white). The 1960 Census counted 3,464,999 Spanish-surnamed persons (an undercount) in the Southwest. Texas and California housed 82 percent of them. During the 1960s, Los Angeles County’s Mexican population doubled from 576,716 to 1,228,593—an increase of 113 percent. The white population decreased from 4,877,150 to 4,777,909—a 2 percent drop. During the sixties, Los Angeles became a Mexican City, not just because it had more Mexicans outside of Mexico City and Guadalajara, but because it was a media center.

I realized that I could not understand history without understanding the meaning of el Baruyo or Barullo. I could not get that from a library. My circumstances limited my participation – being married with two boys marked my territory. However, I was fortunate that spring of 1971 to visit Cuernavaca, Mexico for several months. Other than my stint in the army, the first time I had ever been outside of Los Angeles for more than a week. here I was able to visit el Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) – a think tank founded by that Ivan in 1961. Illich was a guru who warned against the First World’s the imposition of its cultural values on Latin America, founding CIDOC to train priests and nuns to think of themselves as guests and not the saviors of the poor.

Illich’s publication of Deschooling Society (1971) was a critical discourse of public education, moved him to the eye of the storm. According to Illich, universal education through schooling was not feasible, and he said de-institutionalizing education was starting point in de-institutionalizing society. Schools, according to Illich, confused process and substance. Students were “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, and success with a diploma. According to Illich, they schooled the students’ imagination to accept service in place of value. His solution was to get rid of the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge were efficient and benevolent.

Illich’s dragon was the monopoly of the schools of education that in turn blinded poor people and I saw that the problem gave them the illusion that schooling was the answer to their problems. The objective of schooling thus became the acquisition of material goods in order to increase their consumption. My Cuernavaca adventure brought new meaning to work in the field of education and in 2014 to the evils of privatization. .

Euphemisms and satires have always been a popular method to attack power and corruption. It disguises the views of the author. For example, William Shakespeare often used it in his plays to attack the powerful. During the 17th and 18th centuries Luis de Góngora, a Spanish Baroque lyric poet, employed a style called culteranismo. Las carpas mexicanas, traveling troupes, used farces to mock the government and corruption. Luis Váldez took it to a new height in the founding of the Teatro Campesino.

A lot of things were coming together in 2014. My early education exposed me to the scholastic method that was a method to resolve the contradictions. I remembered the priest saying two opposites cannot be true and they he proceeded to go into the negation. This informed el baruyo.

Contradictions such as that exposed in the film The Godfather (1972) when Emilio Barzini, a head of the Five Families argued at a meeting of the capos “If Don Corleone had all the judges, and the politicians in New York, then he must share them, or let us others use them. He must let us draw the water from the well. Certainly he can present a bill for such services; after all… we are not Communists” We are not Communists” so in 2010 the U.S. spent $8,233 on health per person. Norway, the Netherlands and Switzerland spent at least $3,000 less per person. The average member members of the other 33 developed OECD countries spent $3,268 per person for health care. The U.S. lagged behind other nations in hospital beds per 1,000 patients; it had less practicing physicians 2.4 physicians per 1,000 people compared to 3.1 for the other OECD member states.