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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nI learned a few months ago that the old Star Seeds Caf\u00e9 near the UT campus had been demolished, a casualty of the I-35 expansion project.\u00a0 I was sad about this not because I miss the food\u2014the old Star Seeds was always an acquired taste.\u00a0 My sense of loss, rather, has to do with the fact that the Star Seeds Caf\u00e9 had been at the nexus of important professional and personal roads for me since my early 20s.\u00a0 And I have never attended the University of Texas as a student or lived in Austin.\u00a0 This requires some explanation\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n
I am a professional historian.\u00a0I\u2019ve taught at Portland State University in Oregon, down the highway at Texas A&M University, and, since last fall, have begun what I expect will be my final faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin.\u00a0 So this is an interesting time for me, one of reflection.\u00a0 At the age of 54 after more than three decades of a professional career studying U.S., Mexican American, and Texas history at these other institutions, these days I find myself spending a good deal of time learning how things work at my new university, where to go, and building relationships with a lot of new folks in and out of Garrison Hall.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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As exciting as it is, this newness can also be humbling. \u00a0For example, I participated in a faculty orientation process before fall classes began.\u00a0 This old dog was eager to learn new tricks.\u00a0 In those training sessions I distinctly remember a presenter chuckling about the first time they experienced the \u201cpassing period.\u201d\u00a0 I had no idea why everyone thought this was funny, though context clues told me it involved students leaving class early.\u00a0 Oh well, I thought, each school has its own traditions.\u00a0 I resolved to be on the lookout for this so-called passing period on my teaching schedule, did not see it, and felt relieved\u2014too bad for all those other suckers whose classes abutted this mysterious time! \u00a0And then on my first day, I found out what it really was and how class times really worked. \u00a0I had a chuckle\u2026this time at myself. \u00a0I\u2019ve had additional little, surprising revelations in my new job, none of them quite so foolish.\u00a0 This is all a part of joining a new university, a universal experience for all faculty.\u00a0 And yet, I am in a slightly different position in that I\u2019ve known this place in an entirely different context for decades.\u00a0 In fact, I\u2019ve been coming to the University of Texas at Austin (and the Star Seeds Caf\u00e9) for over 30 years.\u00a0 The road to my historical research runs through this place.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As a historian of U.S., Mexican American, and Texas history, I have visited libraries and other archival repositories all over the country, though none so often and so deeply as the places of learning on this campus.\u00a0 The products of this research are my published books and essays.\u00a0 My first major research project, an extension of my Rice University dissertation, was a study of education policy and bilingualism in Texas schools.\u00a0 This resulted in some published essays in academic journals as well as a book, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836\u20131981<\/em> (Texas A&M Press, 2004).\u00a0 My next major project was a biography of the famed University of Texas educator and civil rights advocate, Dr. George I. S\u00e1nchez, whose name graces UT\u2019s College of Education building.\u00a0 That project resulted in another book, George I. S\u00e1nchez and the Long Fight for Integration<\/em> (Yale University Press, 2014).\u00a0 All told I\u2019ve authored over 20 essays in books, journals, or magazines and edited one other book, but it is those two major projects that have cemented my longstanding connection to this university and the treasures in its libraries.\u00a0 In all this work I find hidden, obscured voices of the past and bring them to light; I study not just conflict and injustice, but also the passion and joy that infuse those who try to make their worlds better places; I connect the dots between past and present, always believing that our shared future can be positively shaped by studying our shared past.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard not to feel romantic about that mission!\u00a0 For years now, I have experienced those feelings whenever I conduct research.\u00a0 And I\u2019ve had many of those feelings here on the 40 acres.\u00a0<\/p>\n I find research highly personal.\u00a0 I form a strong emotive connection to the places it takes me.\u00a0 Whether I am spending a week or two in Sleepy Hollow, New York to work in the General Education Board papers, in Nashville, Tennessee to work in the Julius Rosenwald Fund papers, in Pasadena, California at the beautiful Huntington Library, or College Park, Maryland\u2019s mammoth National Archives II facility, each place I visit leaves an imprint.\u00a0 For example, the panoptical monitoring in the reading room at the Rockefeller Archives with constant reminders about breaking the rules of how many pages one can access on one\u2019s desk or how folders are filed back in their containers are as vivid to me as are the New York-style pies from The Horsman, the neighborhood pizzeria, and its views of the spectacular Hudson River. \u00a0And that was two decades ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n As a historian with my particular interests in Texas and Mexican American history, most of the sources I need, however, are in Austin and, more specifically, in the libraries here at UT.\u00a0 I started doing work at the Perry-Casta\u00f1eda Library (PCL) in 1993-94 working on my history MA at nearby Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos (now Texas State University) where I researched the history of higher education expansion in Texas during the 1960s.\u00a0 In the second half of the 1990s my PhD research at Rice University on bilingual education in Texas involved exploring the university\u2019s archival holdings, including the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Barker Texas History Center (now the Briscoe Center for American History), and the Benson Latin American Center.\u00a0 Since then I have continued to visit these archival repositories (and others in town) for biographical research on the University of Texas faculty member Dr. George I. S\u00e1nchez and for other projects. \u00a0<\/p>\n So UT Austin has been an integral part of my professional life for decades now.\u00a0 \u00a0What was all this time on campus like?\u00a0 It had a monotonous rhythm that, I\u2019m sure, must seem tedious to anyone without a passion for history.\u00a0 These trips for the past three decades have entailed staying at several hotels, but most often at the I-35 Rodeway Inn near campus for a week or two at a time.\u00a0 This was usually during the summer months.\u00a0 On these trips I would get up early, scarf down a heavy breakfast knowing that I would work through lunch, and hustle across Dean Keaton Street to the Benson, Brisco, or LBJ archives to begin the day\u2019s work as soon as they opened.\u00a0 I worked non-stop until closing time near 5:00 PM.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n What scholars actually do in archives might seem mysterious. \u00a0It\u2019s not really. \u00a0My day typically involved sifting through hundreds of pages of old documents, including old carbon copies of letters on onionskin paper.\u00a0 Unfortunately this work creates for me a wave of allergy-related ailments ranging from cold-like sympt0ms to uncomfortable skin rashes.\u00a0 It is a small price to pay for learning about the past as I see it.\u00a0 \u00a0I try my best to ameliorate the expected physical response by daily prophylactic antihistamine doping, an obsessive regime of handwashing every hour or more, using gloves and masks, and a habit (learned the hard way) of not touching my face with my hands or fingers while handling documents.\u00a0 It may sound like odd workplace behavior, but I\u2019ve often thought of this as equivalent to a professional athlete\u2019s pre-game stretching and taping rituals or a singer\u2019s voice exercises.\u00a0 It is necessary to get the job done.\u00a0 It is a built-in cost rather than a burden.\u00a0<\/p>\n After being kicked out of the archives at closing time, I would seek an early dinner (and an urgent one due to having skipped lunch) at nearby eateries, which frequently involved the now extinct Star Seeds Caf\u00e9.\u00a0 After dinner I would walk around campus to stretch my legs.\u00a0 Since most of my research happened in the summer, this meant sweltering walks in athletic gear with copious amounts of sunscreen in a mostly empty University of Texas campus.\u00a0 These post-workday walks were solitary.\u00a0 I wandered campus lost in thought about what I learned that day and how it could inform the larger project.\u00a0<\/p>\n When I was working on the S\u00e1nchez biography, I would walk past the education building bearing his name, touch the plaque, and sometimes have a few silent moments in which I reflected about the remarkable human being I was studying who taught oversubscribed courses to decades of UT students all while running his department and quietly organized groundbreaking civil rights efforts (and suffering consequences for it) from his office in Sutton Hall.\u00a0 My long day of allergy-related symptoms that ended with quiet reflection on hot concrete seemed like a small lift next to S\u00e1nchez\u2019s herculean burdens.\u00a0 After these walks, I placed an evening call to my girlfriend who eventually became my spouse and in time these calls also involved our growing children.\u00a0 They punctuated a very long day and lead to a much-needed sleep to prepare for another similarly long day.\u00a0 I can still remember one evening during a two-week research trip in the late 1990s having an evening cheeseburger and a Shiner Bock (or a few\u2026) at the Star Seeds while reading a monograph on early 20th<\/sup> century anarcho-syndicalism along the U.S.-Mexico border by the dimmed, neon light of the bar.\u00a0 In that moment I was as happy as a lark, doing what I loved, though with enough self-awareness to realize I must have seemed a weird sight to the other bar patrons, who left me to my book.\u00a0<\/p>\n However, these trips to Austin and the University of Texas contained much-needed moments in which the world outside of work joyfully broke up my owlish solitude.\u00a0 In the first half of the 1990s, for example, after my visits to the PCL, I would spend time with a dear cousin.\u00a0 We would have the kind of long chats about life that are such a part of being in one\u2019s early 20s.\u00a0 In those days I also would visit a high school friend who happened to be a Longhorn football player.\u00a0 On one occasion this resulted in my tagging along with some very large guys to a country dance hall off of Ben White Boulevard, one of my few ventures into the famed Austin nightlife.\u00a0 That was fun!\u00a0 By the 2000s I was more personally settled.\u00a0 My Austin trips brought me to visit family who had moved to the area\u2014tias<\/em>, tios<\/em>, and primos<\/em>\u2014at lovely dinners they provided for their vagabond relative temporarily living in a hotel near the interstate.\u00a0 We traded family stories and I would listen, especially to the older generations, to their lived experiences of the very things I was reading about in the archives that day.\u00a0<\/p>\n My sense of this campus and city is, in part, also an idealized connection.\u00a0 As the center for intellectual and cultural life in this state, Austin always had a special meaning for me even going back to when I was an aspiring, wannabe teen intellectual living a small South Texas town.\u00a0 And my academic research has always felt as if it were tapping into different parts of my personal history.\u00a0 Going through letters written by a young Lyndon Johnson in the 1920s about teaching Mexican American children at a segregated school brought to mind my mother and her family and the stories they told me.\u00a0 They would have gone to the same kinds of schools from their ranches, farms, and towns in the South Texas brush country of that era; they also would have been as unknowledgeable of the English language as young Lyndon\u2019s students in Cotulla, Texas. \u00a0For my biography of George I. S\u00e1nchez, I could not but help to compare his life and choices to my own as his work gradually revealed itself to me over many years of going through his manuscript collection at the Benson Latin American Center.\u00a0 I even caught myself using his own rhetorical flourishes in my daily emails!<\/p>\n All those experiences, the jumbling of my personal and professional selves that are so firmly rooted to this university, have now evolved.\u00a0 In my early 50s I find myself no longer on the outside looking into an idealized UT, but on the inside looking out in a very real and now lived-in space.\u00a0 Being here regularly means a different kind of connection.\u00a0 Now I can feel the bustle of the university when the students are going to and from class (in the passing period, of course).\u00a0 I now teach my classes and attend meetings in the very buildings that I once only knew as exteriors from my middle-of-summer, sweaty, evening hikes.\u00a0 And I now notice how many things have changed since the 1990s:\u00a0 the campus is more walkable, but less drivable than it once was; the massive Jester parking lot has been replaced by an art museum bearing my surname (no relation); and for the first time ever I got to actually go up \u201cThe Tower\u201d for a reception. \u00a0It was a revelation after so many years staring at it from the outside wondering what it was like on the inside.\u00a0 I am making all-new personal connections to this place, which remains the site of so much of the intellectual odyssey that led me here.\u00a0 My excitement at having new colleagues and students is only enhanced by my sense of how they are deepening and expanding upon those existing memories.\u00a0<\/p>\n The 40 acres is a special place. \u00a0For me, it\u2019s a site both familiar and unknown\u2014one that I\u2019m constantly rediscovering as my roads of personal and professional discovery merge in ways I couldn\u2019t have imagined. \u00a0Sadly I\u2019ll be having these new experiences without the Star Seeds Caf\u00e9, but I\u2019m sure there is plenty more to discover on the converging road ahead.\u00a0<\/p>\n The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I learned a few months ago that the old Star Seeds Caf\u00e9 near the UT campus had been demolished, a casualty of the I-35 expansion project.\u00a0 I was sad about this not because I miss the food\u2014the old Star Seeds was always an acquired taste.\u00a0 My sense of loss, rather, has to do with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":167710,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[47973,67433,67434,30310,15837,1600],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-167709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-acres","tag-converging","tag-forty","tag-researching","tag-roads","tag-working"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Book](\"https:\/\/notevenpast.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-2-672x1024.png\")
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