http://lap.sagepub.com/Latin American Perspectives

http://lap.sagepub.com/content/40/6/65The online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X13504201

2013 40: 65Latin American PerspectivesNorma Stoltz Chinchilla

Latin American Perspectives: School for Scholars  

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of: 

Latin American Perspectives, Inc.

can be found at:Latin American PerspectivesAdditional services and information for    

  http://lap.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

 

http://lap.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:  

What is This? 

- Oct 17, 2013Version of Record >>

at UNCU on May 15, 2014lap.sagepub.comDownloaded from at UNCU on May 15, 2014lap.sagepub.comDownloaded from

65

Latin American Perspectives

School for Scholars by

Norma Stoltz Chinchilla

It is hard to imagine what my life—political and personal as well as academic—would have been like without Latin American Perspectives.

I enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin in 1969 thinking (naively) that studying sociology in a U.S. university with a progressive history would give me the frameworks and tools I needed to be an activist academic, one whose research and teaching was intimately involved with and could help shape progressive change.

Having studied in an experimental undergraduate program based on the Oxford model, without traditional disciplinary majors (Raymond College at the University of the Pacific), I knew very little about traditional disciplinary bound-aries or the more quantitative and positivist direction in which highly ranked departments in U. S. universities were headed. My heroes—in addition, of course, to C. Wright Mills—were the Latin American sociologists to whom I had been exposed during a summer session at the University of Veracruz in Xalapa, Mexico, while I was in high school and while studying at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala on a Fulbright after receiving my B.A. degree in 1965.

I learned important things in graduate school, and, even more important, forged friendships with Latin Americans who went back to become academics and activists in their respective countries, but overall the experience was a painful and disappointing one and ultimately unsatisfying.

Being privileged to be one of the founding members of the Latin American Perspectives editorial collective—invited by Don and Marjorie Bray, my new mentors and friends when I accepted my first faculty position at Pitzer College in 1970—served as the graduate school experience I wished I had had and became my ongoing source of intellectual development and political educa-tion. It was through my work with the journal that I learned how to analyze deeply and critically and use a multiplicity of research tools to pursue answers to important questions of the day. It was in the process of conceptualizing and editing articles and in the journal debates that I learned how to write or, rather, unlearned the bad (abstruse and obscurantist) writing habits that I had learned in graduate school.

If I had to choose the experiences that were the most formative, in addition to the overall group experience, they would be editing or helping with the issues on Chile (the Allende period and the coup and its aftermath), the rela-tionship of feminism to Marxism and to Latin American revolutionary move-ments (particularly Nicaragua), and the articulation of the modes-of-production

504201LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X13504201LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESChinchilla /2013

Norma Stoltz Chinchilla is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at California State University, Long Beach, director of the Long Beach Immigrant Rights Coalition, and a founding member and honorary editor of Latin American Perspectives.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 193, Vol. 40 No. 6, November 2013 65-66DOI: 10.1177/0094582X13504201© 2013 Latin American Perspectives

at UNCU on May 15, 2014lap.sagepub.comDownloaded from

66 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

paradigm. These were the issues that I later developed in other published work and that came to influence the scholarship for which I am known. The journal not only helped to transform the paradigms for Latin American studies in the United States and elsewhere but transformed the lives of many of us who have been part of it.

at UNCU on May 15, 2014lap.sagepub.comDownloaded from