To the members of the Personnel Committee
| In accordance with the rules and procedures governing Faculty appointment, tenure, and promotion, I submit my personal statement on teaching, professional achievement, and service to the College and the Academic community at large. |
| Enclosed also find some additional material. |
| Baltasar Fra-Molinero |
| Associate Professor of Spanish |
| March 2000. |
Table of Contents
1. Statement on Teaching
| Teaching at Bates College | |
| The CBB Program in Ecuador (see Appendix F) | |
| Teaching methods | |
| Multimedia and the internet in the classroom | |
| The Fuenteovejuna CD-ROM Project | |
| The major in Spanish | |
| List of Courses taught by me at Bates College | |
| List of Theses directed | |
| Honors Theses in which I have participated as chair or committee member | |
| Independent studies | |
| 2. Statement on Scholarship and Service to the Profession | |
| Doctorado en Lengua y Literatura inglesas. University of Seville | |
| Ph. D. Dissertation. University of Indiana | |
| Scholarly publications | |
| Current scholarly projects | |
| Other service to the Academic community outside Bates | |
| 3. Service to Bates College | |
| Future direction of my service at Bates College | |
| List of Committees in which I have served at Bates College | |
| Community at large: | |
Appendices:
Teaching Spanish at a U.S. university becomes a perplexing proposition. As a Spaniard growing up in the nineteen sixties and seventies, I was taught that Spanish was an imperial language that had accompanied the conquistadors across the Atlantic, as the humanist Antonio de Nebrija had predicted in 1492 when he presented to Queen Isabella with his Spanish Grammar, the first of its kind in a vernacular language in Europe. The raising of my right arm in the fascist salute and the singing of hymns of past conquests at the age of seven was systematically counterbalanced back at home. From Monday to Saturday, at 2.15 in the afternoon--lunch time in Spain--a ritual took place in which my younger brother and I were the acolytes. My younger brother and I took turns at rotating the dial of the German radio set moving from Spanish National Radio to the BBC service in Spanish. Ther radio was an old German Telefunken wooden box purchased by my father before the Spanish civil war from a brothel going out of business.
--Aquí, Londres...
We listened in silence. Fifteen minutes later, a new dial change, and the official news from the Spanish National
Radio was the signal that we could all talk freely at the table about our daily lives. Tacitly, and tactfully, I was
being taught an important lesson in the need of multiple perspectives to construct the truth. Even in a time of
silence like the nineteen sixties in Spain.
When I finally decided to teach Spanish in this country, the pleasures and ideological battles that had taken place in my childhood education were very much in my mind. Spanish is unlike any other "foreign" language in the American curricular tradition. The US census for 1990 estimates that a 12 % of the U.S. population uses Spanish as their main language of communication. But Spanish in the U.S. lacks the traditional institutions associated with a national language. The teaching of Spanish is affected by this situation. On the one hand, large numbers of students choose to study Spanish because they see immediate possibilities for communication with neighboring Spanish speaking peoples. They demand practical formulas for concrete and limited needs. It is what cultural activist Guillermo Gómez Peña has facetiously documented as "easy Spanish for lawn and garden", or "easy Spanish for construction" (talk to workers, simple phrases for everyone). (1)
The response of many Spanish instructors to this image of the Spanish language has been a defensive one in the
past. As a counter measure, emphasis has been directed to the teaching of Peninsular Spanish and Peninsular
literature and culture. Spain's geographic position in the southwestern tip of Europe and its imperial past would
put the Spanish language at a par with French and German. While both morally unacceptable and unrealistic, this
solution to the complex of being a "third world language" or a " garlic language" gives exclusive legitimacy to one
Spanish speaking community of "whites" thousands of miles away from the majority of the Spanish speaking
population. It also illegitimizes and erases the majority of "non-whites" who speak and function in Spanish in
twenty Latin American countries, and in the United States.
Curriculum transformation is one of the most frequently touted concepts in academic life these days. In the study
of Spanish dramatic changes have taken place in the last decade. The so-called cultural wars have had their impact
in the field of Hispanic and Latin American studies, albeit with less fanfare. Since the nineteen-seventies the U.S.
world of Hispanic studies has seen a deep transformation in two directions. The first deep changes involved the
creation of programs of Latin American studies, and the establishment of Latin American literature as the point of
reference of most textbooks for the teaching of Spanish. Following the trail opened by Black studies, a second
front appeared in the mid eighties with the creation of programs of U.S. Latino Studies, Border Studies, and
Chicano Studies. New constituencies of students of Spanish have been demanding a closer attention to current
political and social issues present in the Spanish-speaking world. Equally important is the growing need among
U.S. Latino students to discuss their identity. Spanish departments around the country have provided a mixed
response to the academic interests of the U.S. student population of Hispanic descent.
My personal decision to teach and do research in Colonial Spanish American letters is partly motivated by a desire
to break with the past. The study of literature in Spanish was methodologically divided between the two sides of
the Atlantic. It still is. Moreover, it follows further national divisions that impede a clear view of a culture that
speaks across frontiers and political boundaries. Gabriel García Márquez draws crowds in his native Colombia as
much as in Barcelona, Spain. The false dichotomy between Peninsular and American fields is nowhere more
evident than in the literary productions of the 16th and 17th centuries, where famous writers who started producing
on one side of the Atlantic ended their literary careers on the other. Students at Bates College become aware in
my classes that soon after the conquest of Mexico, the descendants of the conquered were producing a literature
of memory and protest that has continued to this day. Bartolomé de las Casas in the 16th century, the writings of
Ignacio Ellacuría and the other Jesuits assassinated in El Salvador in the 1990s, the political manifestoes of the
Chiapas Zapatista movement, or more recently the precedent-setting extradition case of Augusto Pinochet
initiated by a Spanish judge, all read as part of the same rhetorical effort.
Teaching at Bates College
The atmosphere around language teaching at Bates College is very positive and affirming. Languages are taken
very seriously by the students, the faculty at large, and the administration.
Teaching Spanish at Bates College requires a double focus. On the one hand, the majority of students who choose
to study Spanish does it after having taken a few semesters in the language at the high school level. They are for
the most part excellent language students. On the other hand, one has to balance the needs of those students who
wish to pursue a Spanish major, and those who wish to perfect their language skills with no further need for a
more detailed study of literature, history, and culture. This situation is common to most liberal arts colleges
around the country.
As a Spanish professor at Bates College I have to dedicate equal amounts of time to the teaching of all three levels
of the language, as well as the literature and culture courses for the more advanced students in the major and the
minor concentration. What on paper seems to be two different activities, in reality it is one and the same.
Literature courses do not dispense with language instruction. Also, at the most elementary level of Spanish, when
students are dealing with the existential puzzle of two verbs--ser and estar'-they are introduced to different ways
of organizing the world in terms of language. But students who approach Spanish at the 100 level also want to
know more about the peoples who speak the language. We live in fortunate times where this need can be fulfilled
in a variety of ways. Long gone are the days in which the study of a foreign language was a series of exercises in
translation. Our students want to learn Spanish in order to speak it. In this sense, the textbook is not a
straightjacket for the student anymore, but rather a resource and guide for communicative activities. The
incorporation of multimedia to the classroom adds sounds, images and situations to the experience of language
learning that continually challenge students and teachers alike. Nowhere is this more evident than at the
intermediate and early advanced levels. Students have all the news from Latin America and Spain at their finger
tips twenty four hours a day. Access to radio stations and newpapers through the Internet has become a staple
source for classroom projects and exercises.
Being a "native speaker" of the language, one of my most important tasks is to make the classroom atmosphere a comfortable one, in which my use of the language and my accent will be seen by the students as an opportunity, more than as a challenge. Students come to the classroom with certain expectations, something I have learned in the course of time. One of them is that native speaker teachers are "harder." Another is that being from Spain makes my Spanish "better." If not addressed promptly, assumptions like these exact a heavy toll on the interaction between teacher and students. Being male also gives my presence in the classroom a certain aura of authority which many of my women colleagues find hard to establish and easy to see challenged. One of my first jokes in class is to apologize for not having a Mexican accent. If a vote were to be held tomorrow, I tell them on my first day of class, Mexico would win hands down with its one hundred million plus speakers.
Language learning requires a considerable amount of individual work, which comes as a surprise to those students
who have never taken a course in a language other than their own. One of the first things I do in my language
classes is to remind students of the amount of time their homework will take them. From my own experience in
learning English, I remember how useful memorization was in order to prepare the tasks ahead of me in the dally
contact with my English instructors. Oral proficiency has a lot to do with the techniques used in play rehearsal.
One of my most vivid experiences happened in the Fall of 1996, during the staging of Miguel de Cervantes' El
retablo de las maravillas. Students who volunteered for the parts ranged in language skill from the native speaker
to the struggling with advanced proficiency. As the students learned their lines better and better, the pronunciation
and "naturalness" of expression surfaced. I was also surprised to see non native speakers feel more and more
comfortable with the use of the Spanish language to make points and commentaries, ask questions and offer
criticism.
The instruction in Spanish at college level is markedly different from the situation in a high school or a language
institute. The difference resides in the integration of language teaching with other academic and cultural activities
around Campus. Since my arrival at Bates in the Fall of 1994 I decided to make my students avail
themselves--even at the less advanced levels--of the opportunities for cultural enhancement that the college
provided. It is my belief that learning a language does not take place inside the classroom exclusively. This
nostrum, however, needs to be given adequate expression at every opportunity. During my second semester at
Bates I made my intermediate level students of Spanish 202 visit the collection of Peruvian pre-Inca clay
sculptures that is housed at the Bates Art Museum. Although the documentation and information was basically in
English, students had to write simple reports and descriptions of objects in Spanish. More recently, students in
my Spanish 202 class had the opportunity to go to Portland to see the Academy-nominated Spanish film Todo
sobre mi madre (All about my mother), and write a report on it. Most students rise to the challenged of having to
produce a higher level of written Spanish to communicate their reaction to these uncommonly beautiful works of
art and culture.
My class syllabi are detailed as to the day to day tasks inside the classroom, but students also realize that other
events and unspecified activities will be an important component of the course. I make a habit to make impromptu
announcements in class about lectures and cultural events taking place at Bates College. I use these occasions to
complement the curriculum with meaningful activities in which the use of Spanish is privileged. Whether it is a
lecture or an exhibition of Chicano political poster art, students find themselves doing research that fills their
universe of things popularly labeled "Spanish" with a more nuanced point of view.
The CBB Program in Ecuador (see Appendix F)
One of the traditions that I hope I will be able to continue and further help develop concerns students who start
Spanish at Bates at the elementary level and continue to major in Spanish. I feel strongly about this because I
also started English in college from the ground level all the way to reading Beowulf and Chaucer in the original
four years later. It is important to spread the message on Campus that starting Spanish from zero and majoring in
it is not only possible, but it happens every year. Two key elements are present in this "miracle":
Six months are sufficient to give the student the confidence and the proficiency necessary to accomplish the final
goal of graduating with a thesis totally written in Spanish. In this respect the creation of a strong program
abroad for Spanish majors will be the single most important event in the Spanish major in the near future. In my
professional statement of 1998 I wrote:
Hopefully, the efforts currently under way with fellow colleges in the area around a Mellon Foundation Grant will
provide us with this much needed opportunity to shape the Spanish major to the actual needs of Bates' students. I
have expressed in the past my commitment to this program, and my willingness to fully participate in it. I feel it is
the duty of the Spanish faculty at Bates to be present during such a defining experience as the extended stay in a
Spanish speaking country.
As I write now I can say that I the goals I had set for myself and the program have been accomplished with
respect to the CBB Program in Quito, Ecuador. Professor Enrique Yepes of Bowdoin College and myself made a
joint proposal and co-directed the inaugural program for 12 students of the three colleges forming the Consortium
under the title "Ecuador: A Plurinational Society." The program was both academically demanding and
innovative. It included a social awareness component that required our students to complete an independent study
project connected to a social work activity in Quito. On the academic side, students had to choose two courses
out of three in diverse areas such as literature, history of culture, and environmental politics. Organized visits to
different regions of Ecuador and a visit to Machu Picchu in Peru were among the highlights of the semester
abroad. I remain deeply commited to the success of study-abroad programs directed by our Faculty, as they are a
means to explore new methods of teaching and taking advantage of the certain academic resources that a stay off
campus can bring more easily. At a personal level, my stay of three and a half months in Ecuador availed me of
important research opportunities, of which I write in the Professional Achievement Section of this Statement.
Teaching methods
The Spanish proverb says cada maestrillo tiene su librillo, each teacher has her or his own method. In seventeen
years of language teaching I have experienced many situations. Each has been different. The subject matter in each
case has dictated a particular approach. Modern language instruction is done in our time with the goal of teaching
those skills that will make the student fluent in the target language in as short a period of time as it is possible.
However, as I indicated before, teaching the four basic skills--reading, listening, speaking, and writing--cannot be
done in isolation from the cultures and peoples who speak the language.
The classroom has been seen by many language instructors and methodologies as an imperfect language
community trying to become more perfect in proficiency. According to this approach, the teacher is the most
perfect speaker, and she or he tries to reproduce as many natural speaking situations as it is possible, if it is
possible at all. The emphasis is put on speech production. Reading, writing, and in many cases listening, is left for
homework activities.
I prefer a different approach. I consider each class meetinga moment of exchange of ideas and experiences
between the students and the teacher, but also among the students themselves. A language is being learned, and
attention to the process of learning itself is of primary importance. In a college situation, students want to discuss
issues, no matter what their level of language competence is at one given moment. They also want to hear what
the instructor says, ask for clarification of obscure or perplexing points, etc. For the most part, I still hold to the
idea of using Spanish as the almost exclusive means of communication. The initial difficulties start disappearing
after the second week of classes.
The classroom is a physical space that needs to be reconfigured for language instruction. On the first day of class I
ask the students to rearrange their seats into an inverted U, so everybody can face one another and communicate
from one end to the other. This disposition also facilitates work in small groups, where students have the chance
to sound off their Spanish without the apprehension of "making mistakes" in front of everybody, including the
instructor. I do not consider my language class a success if I do not create the opportunity for each and everyone
of my students to speak several times in class, and hear their own voice in Spanish. It has been a great help that
the enrollment caps in our Spanish language courses have been considerably reduced.
The choice of a textbook is obviously a key element in the successful conduction of a class. My criteria for this
have been the accuracy and clarity of grammatical explanation, its cultural variety-- including extensive coverage
of U.S. Spanish speaking communities-- and its updatedness to recent historical and political events. Photographs
of Mexican presidents of 12 years ago will not do in a 1996 edition. The textbook is a source of activities from
which I select the most relevant for my objectives. In intermediate courses-- and elementary ones when I taught
them before coming to Bates-- certain grammatical points need to be more emphasized than others. I follow with a
lot of interest the changes in grammatical explanations Spanish textbooks offer. Certain forbidding subjects such
as the mighty subjunctive and verbal conjugations in general are presented in a much more humane ways these
days. I try to follow suit, and I de-emphasize the importance of complete grammatical accuracy in favor of
successful communication at the early levels. I insist, though, that students complete their audiotape exercises,
which although boring, serve the purpose of revising grammatical, vocabulary and conversation topics covered in
class. I try to create examples in grammatical explanations that show how similar in structure English and Spanish
are after all. Students tend to react very positively when the English grammar is explained to them in some of its
arcanes. Do you know that the English grammar has a zero relative pronoun and a zero conjunction? As in "the
picture I saw yesterday" or "I told her I had already finished my homework." Well, in Spanish there is no such
luck. No zero relatives or conjunctions! The kingdom of "que" is still unconquered by the forces of language
change. This is an example of ways in which I try to make grammatical points more interesting and relevant to my
students, for most of whom English is their first language of expression.
My record shows my enthusiasm for new technologies. However, interest and curiosity for new approaches and
technologies in education has not made me a thrall to them or to their underlying philosophies. One of the
undesirable consequences of the incorporation of new technologies into language teaching is the reinscription of
the hierarchichal positioning of the front of the classroom as the site of knowledge and power that more dialogic
pedagogies had succeeded in eroding. Efforts need to be made to build language teaching environments where the
gadgetry will not imprison the body of the learner. As much as I find computers and VCRs fascinating and useful,
I still consider the piece of chalk, the blackboard, and the immediate physical presence of all involved, the most
effective vehicle for learning. Chalk and board are quick, and they allow for the participation and involvement of
all present in a classroom if the activity so requires. I have stated in public on several occasions that computers
and computer screens will have to look and "act" like books and blackboards if they are to succeed inside the
classroom in the next ten years, or else they will go the way of the language laboratories of the nineteen sixties and
seventies.
Teaching occurs as much inside the classroom as outside. I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Spanish
table on Tuesday evenings at the Commons. There the faculty in Spanish mix with a variety of students, both
majors and non-majors. Many former students in the program pay short visits to try and refresh their Spanish.
Others, as they get ready to go on a program abroad in Spain or Latin America, use La mesa de español as a
testing ground that helps them reduce the apprehension before departing for their big adventure. Organizing
cultural events with the participation of Spanish-speaking scholars and artists has had also a very positive effect on
my students. The visit of Cuban musicians in January of this year exposed both my students and students in other
fields (Music, Anthropology) to the experience of communicating in Spanish and about subjects pertaining to the
Spanish-speaking peoples of the world.
The short term unit is one of my favorite ways to create new spaces and modes of learning. Its flexibility of
schedule has allowed me to bring students to venues and places that otherwise would have been impossible. I have
taken students to Brazil, Spain and Morocco. Following the orignal idea from Czerny Brasuell, Director of
Multicultural Affairs I participated in a summer excursion to Salvador de Bahía in Brazil, following the short term
unit "Africa in Me: Cultural Tramissions in Brazil," Also at the behest of the Director of Multicultural Affairs, I
participated in the organization a short term unit abroad under the title "Spain: Christians, Jews, and Muslims"
with Professor Mishael Caspi of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. After a two week intensive
instructional period on Campus, we accompanied sixteeen students on an adventure that took us to the sites and
monuments of a period in history and a society where people of three different cultural and religious backgrounds
lived together through periods of peace and strife. The experience generated sufficient interest on Campus for
students to be involved now in the study of Arabic, besides the commitment of some of those students to the
Spanish major.
In my literature and culture courses I have tried to combine sections for both Spanish majors and non-Spanish
majors. This supposed devising some creative ways of dividing students and tasks, as well as some extra time of
teaching in front of students on my part. The first course where I tried this was The Picaresque hero, with the
class evenly divided into "English" and "Spanish" sections. I have realized that this technique works particularly
well during short term. Students in each section meet with me separately and the class is conducted in one or the
other language. But also students have common sessions where the class is conducted in English. A combination
of lectures and seminar discussions. With this dual language sections I hope to expand the exposure of Bates
students to Hispanic cultures without necessarily forcing anyone to get involved in the major or a secondary
concentration, especially if their language skills do not allow them to take a class entirely conducted in Spanish.
However, as I state very clearly in the syllabus and at the beginning of the course, the "English" option cannot
count for the Spanish major other than as the tenth course.
When I teach literature I have to make hard choices. How much time should I devote to lectures? What kind of
exercises and activities should I devise to make students more active and participative in the classroom? My
preferred solution at this point in my teaching career tends to divide time clearly into the two different modes of
teaching. Students come prepared certain days of the week to discuss a particular text or set of questions that I
posed to them previously. On other occasions, they come to class to take notes and ask questions in a session
conducted by me in a lecture mode. The lecture has been a whipping horse of many pedagogues in the recent past.
The emergence of the seminar class is the result of this justifiable rejection of the imposing authority of a professor
who gives one-- his or her own-- interpretation of the subject in detriment of others. However, I defend the
lecture mode in combination with the discussion session for three main reasons. The first reason is pragmatic.
The second reason is pedagogical. The third one is ethical.
Lectures on a particular subject of the syllabus are good ways of summarizing and ordering information that
students need to know in order to approach a literary text. a film, or a historical event. As a teacher I can alert
students in a lecture about certain themes, facts, names and opinions given by scholars and philosophers that
otherwise would take an impractical amount of time for them to acquire by themselves at the library or elsewhere.
The second reason is that a lecture is an organizing device for knowledge. Students learn how to discriminate the
exposition of knowledge. Lecturing is an exercise in public rhetoric, and students in Spanish can benefit from
listening to certain rhetorical practices in the Spanish speaking world. In turn, during my literature and culture
classes, I afford students the opportunity to give mini-lectures of three to five minutes in Spanish, without notes.
Through lectures students learn the art of taking notes in Spanish, selecting what is relevant to them and to a
particular task, such as an exam, an essay that involves a response to a question, or a group discussion. I provide
my students with a guión or guideline of the main points to be addressed, and with this I try to give them an
overview of the topic.
The third reason why I favor the continuation of the lecture practice in combination with seminar-like sessions is ethical. It is my duty as an educator to expose my ideas in public for comment and discussion. I try to provide an atmosphere of trust and confidence in class, so that students feel entitled to challenge my views and ask for clarification of points that do not make sense. Through a lecture I expose students to the intellectual practices and history of different peoples in different times. Students become aware that not all people know the same things or the same amount of the same thing. A lecture is a public event in which culture is being produced in an atmosphere of respect, but not necessarily acquiescence. As a teacher I am seen as someone who knows about the issues covered in the syllabus of a course in literature or culture. The Spanish major is the name that Bates College gives to a set of knowledge practices and epistemologies in which the professor is certainly not at the same level of knowledge with her or his students. It would be easy for me to send students to the library to learn about Erasmus and his influence on Spanish religious thought in the 16th century. But why is studying Erasmus relevant? I need to answer this question in an expository manner. Why is Sir Thomas More so important in the laying out of Mexican society after the conquest by the Spaniards? The late Latin American critic Ángel Rama explained this, and he chose to talk of the Spanish American Colonial world of letters for a purpose that is very relevant to Latin Americans today. (2)
In my lectures I explain why it is important to read Rama, or even Sir Thomas More, as a complement to the
letters of Hernán Cortés, who read Amadís de Gaula, the favorite reading of St. Teresa of Avila, Don Quijote,
Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel García Márquez. The lecture is the best way I know to participate to students of the
interrelatedness of knowledge. These relations exist in me because I have made them, and it is my duty to teach
students how to make connections of their own creation by providing a model, from which I hope they depart
soon in dissent.
But seminars and discussions are the other side of the coin of a lecture. In English, to lecture means in some
contexts to sermonize and admonish. The silence of the student during a lecture is productive, and not at all
"passive learning". Questions may and will arise from listening and processing information. The turn comes later
for students to give account of the experience of reading, or viewing a film. I organize students in discussion
groups around concrete activities and prearranged sets of questions and problems. In most cases I ask the students
also to keep a reading journal in their literature classes, so the effort of daily reading will not be lost when the
discussion takes place a few days later.
I devise discussion sessions of two kinds. Some sessions are devoted to the general exchange of ideas on a
particular topic, passage, or entire work. I lead the session by posing an open ended question that will elicit
different responses and opinions. Students will bring other examples and pose new questions that may derive the
discussion sometimes to current topics, such as the beauty standards in American society as they reflect updated
Renaissance concepts that were steeped in an aristocratic and unequal society in Europe or Spanish Colonial
America. I try to ask less and less questions as the exchange of ideas becomes more free flowing.
A second type of discussion session centers around a particular task, such as the commentary of a poem or a
particularly difficult passage in a larger work. The set of questions that the students are given in advance are then
discussed in small groups, and after a reasonable amount of time, the groups report to the entire class. This is the
time also for questions and answers about particular aspects of the readings.
In some classes I have also tried to make a student lead a discussion, after she or he briefly presents the
main issues of an article or chapter of a book of literary criticism. The uneavenness of some of these sessions is
compensated by the individual training each of the students acquires at presenting in public critical ideas and
theories, and defending the findings in front of an audience.
Multimedia and the internet in the classroom
The addition of the language learning center at Bates has afforded me the possibility to experiment with different
teaching techniques, in the hope to make language learning more efficient, but also with the aim of enhancing
cultural awareness in the students. In the Fall of 1998 I conducted a project in my Spanish 207 class--the highest
level of language instruction--in which different groups had to elaborate a cultural magazine of their own design,
with original articles and op-ed pages, but also with commentaries on current events in Latin America and Spain.
The magazine is published in the internet.
I would be dishonest if I extolled the virtues of multimedia in the process of language learning without mentioning some of its limitations. The use of multimedia at the present moment is mostly individualized. It enhances the one to one relation between teacher and students, as well as group conferences, but it tends to isolate students from each other. The different levels of computer savvy among students and instructors are also a serious problem for a harmonious teaching environment.
Experience with the internet has made students less and less prone to work with the net unless they see clear
advantages to it, beyond the cutting and pasting exercise of putting together nifty pictures and graphics.
The internet has been particularly useful to me. I have the custom of communicating instructions and reminders to
my students through email postings. I use the Spanish language at all times, and require them to use Spanish also
in their replies. This has shown to have a very positive effect in the writing skills of students. They reply when
they do not understand something I have written to them, and this gives me a feedback of their level of
understanding written Spanish that is more immediate that a question and answer session in class over a particular
textbook passage. The experience has also helped me in establishing more effective levels of language
communication in the classroom. My own homepage was started in the winter of 1997 with the purpose of
providing my students permanent information on syllabi, activities, and other learning resources. Recently it has
been added to the resource list for Spanish at the Bates College Ladd Library, being the only faculty page in the
program so far. Its URL address:
http://www.bates.edu/~bframoli/pagina.html
The use of multimedia requires the presence and involvement of the instructor to levels that far surpass the
relation between teacher and student through the aid of a textbook. The use of video in the classroom is
particularly effective when it is produced to fulfill the language needs of the students. Exercises connected to
video programs are an effective way to improve the listening ability of the students. The help they provide to put
vocabulary in context also makes videos an effective improvement from the drudge of the vocabulary lists still
sporting the first pages of every chapter of a language book.
The Fuenteovejuna CD-ROM Project
I am currently involved in the finishing stages of production of a multimedia edition of Fuenteovejuna, the
classical play written by Lope de Vega. In this project I am working in collaboration with Professor Pithamber
Polsani, of the University of Arizona, through a CBB Mellon grant. The multimedia project involves the
production of a CD-ROM that combines video images of the play--produced by Spanish Television-- and
synchronous presentation of the text of the play, where the student can consult words and phrases in a dictionary
automatically connected to it. Additionally, the CD-ROM will contain a critical edition of the play, a facsimile of
the first edition, and other audiovisual and written materials that may be of use for the teaching and studying of the
play at different levels, from undergraduate to graduate, and scholarly.
I am happy to say that I tried the CD-ROM quite successfully with my Spanish Golden Age Theater students
last year. Their evaluation of the experience of watching and reading, having a dictionary and notes readily
available, made the hard process of understanding a 17th century classic in Spanish much easier and enriching. The
discussions generated by this mode of reading and viewing were much more informed and enthusiastic than with
any other text of the course. I intend to use this material in more courses than simply the ones marked for that
literary period.
The major in Spanish
Spanish programs around the country have had to struggle with the burden of being considered "service" areas of
teaching with no further academic projection. This is certainly not the case at Bates. Language learning at the
early stages is no more or less a service than upper division courses and seminars. As I discussed before, they are
part of one single effort, and faculty should not be split between language and "literature" courses. This would be
fatal, in my opinion, for the entire program.
The Spanish program is undergoing its most radical curricular transformation ever. The increase in the number of
full time, tenure and tenure-track positions are making these changes possible. We are following the
recommendations of the External Review committee for the Classical and Romance Languages and Literatures
Department during its visit one year ago. The External Review recommended, besides the lowering of enrollment
numbers in the language instruction courses, a more diversified offering in the courses conducting to the
specialization in Spanish.
I have been active in curriculum transformation since my arrival at Bates. I have created new courses every year,
while trying to maintain already existing and important offerings already present in the course catalog. Some of my
courses have been cross listed in the Theater program, African American Studies program and the Classical and
Medieval Studies program.
When I arrived to Bates I was asked to teach the Cervantes seminar, which is offered every two years in the Fall. Some colleagues advised me against the continuation of such a course, because of its intrinsic difficulty. I decided to continue its offering because Cervantes and Don Quijote continue to be among the most important cultural references in the literary and intellectual world of all nations and peoples who speak Spanish throughout the world. Also, the scholarship produced around Cervantes and his major book is among the most exciting. I expose my students to such different views as the classic appreciations of Américo Castro and the latest feminist takes on Dulcinea as a butch construction as explicated by the critic Mary Gossy. (3)
The course continues to be a quite popular one.
One of the greatest satisfactions in teaching at Bates College has been the opportunity to create new courses in
vastly different areas, all with an aim at interdisciplinarity, which is my true advocation. Traditiona Spanish
curricula divided the teaching material of literature courses into periods and classical genres, and also marked a
forbidding barrier between Peninsular Spanish and Latin American authors and texts. It has been my consistent
effort to avoid the pitfalls of such constraint. In the new courses I have created I have mixed authors, texts and
films of both sides of the Atlantic. Some courses still have traditional titles --Literatura colonial, devoted to
Spanish American Colonial literature--and others like The Picaresque hero, a life of crime covers almost five
centuries and creators from the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes to the Mexican cinema of Luis Buñuel
or the neopicaresque Mexican gay novel El vampiro de la colonia Roma.
My own scholarly interests are a fundamental part of what I teach. I created a first year seminar on Afrohispanic
literatures. One of those first year students became a Spanish major and graduated with a thesis on Cuban racial
relations and culture that originated in our class discussions of four years before.
My participation in the Classical and Medieval program was requested by me to the administration. I decided that
the program itself and the Spanish major lacked courses in the area of Medieval Spain. I created a short term unit
and a course. The short term unit, Medieval Spain: Christians, Jews, and Muslims, centered on the pluses and
minuses of the concept of "convivencia" or mutual tolerance between three cultures and religions that shared the
Iberian soil for almost eight hundred years. Students read from homoerotic Andalusi poetry to the teachings of
Maimonides and Averroes on the double truth of religious revelation versus scientific knowledge, or the praise of
short ladies made by Juan Ruiz. In the Spring of 1999 this course was selected by the College to be one of the
short term units off campus. Faculty and students visited Spain and Morocco for close to three weeks. The
course, Loco amor-Buen amor covers a discussion of models and rhetorical discourses of love in the Middle
Ages that are still relevant today--courtly love, platonic concepts of love, the experience of love as physical
pleasure--and texts like the Book of True Love or La Celestina are matched with the poetry of Rosario
Castellanos and the jesuitic contradictions of the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro when it comes to "tolerating"
homosexuality and the validity of sexual pleasure. I have also help create another interdisciplinary short term unit,
Africa in Me: Cultural Transmissions in Brazil, that students in Spanish, African-American Studies and
Rhetoric can take in different modalities.
Another new course added to the Spanish curriculum was Un curso de cine, an attempt to make the Spanish
majors become aware of the need to dominate the critical discourses that analyze the visual arts. This is something
more and more necessary at the present time, as graduate programs in different U.S. universities and also abroad
offer the study of cinema and other media as part of their cultural studies programs.
At Bates College I teach students to speak, read and write in Spanish, so they can marvel at the antics of the
denizens of Macondo, hear the dead speak to Pedro Páramo, or learn from Borges that Don Quijote can still be
written. Spanish is still the best medium to listen to the wind make love to a tree inside Rosario Castellanos' head.
But it is also the ideal vessel to let them sail through the internet towards the urgent prose of newspapers in Chile,
Puerto Rico, Spain, or California, free from tempests. Prospero could never have imagined this.
List of Courses taught by me at Bates College
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Spanish 102 Elementary Spanish II |
| Spanish 201 Intermediate Spanish I |
| Spanish 202 Intermediate Spanish II |
| Spanish 207 Advanced Grammar and Composition I |
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Spanish 341 Cervantes |
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List of Theses directed
1996
David C. Gair. Cervantes: cuestiones de religión, género y matrimonio. (Cervantes: Questions of
Religion, Gender, and Marriage. (Two semester thesis)
Sacha García Bulted. Los efectos de la educación bilingüe sobre los hispanohablantes. (The Effects of
Bilingual Education on Spanish Speakers).
1997
Kendra Aiello. Pablo Sorozábal y la zarzuela contemporánea. (Pablo Sorozábal and Contemporary Zarzuela)
Maria L. DiPietro. Huyendo de la realidad: Susana San Juan, Tomás y el teatro. (Fleeing from Reality:
Susana San Juan, Tomás, and Theatre).
1998
Sonya Szlyk
Christine Conlon
Petulia Blake
Marino Incháustegui
Erika Ellis
1999
Jonathan Rabinovitz Integration of Technology in the Classroom to Enhance Language Learning
Tracy Rubovits ****
Elizabeth Merrill Frida Kahlo
2000 (Currently advising)
Hanh Nguyen La vida de Eva Perón y la ópera "Evita"
Betsy Parkyn "El tres de mayo" de Goya y el "Gernica" de Picasso
Jane Torphy Los gitanos y el flamenco
Honors Theses in which I have participated as chair or committee member
1995
Berit Ilse Eichner. The Dynamics of Conventional and Radical Material in the Works of John Donne and
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
1997
Andrew J. Aspen. Voces de protesta en un Tiempo de Silencio. (Voices of Silence in A Time of Silence)
1999
Deirdra Dastous ****
Maeve Ryan ****
Independent studies
Jennifer Neal. Spanish literature of the Renaissance
Spanish Medieval Literature
Michael Maher. The Cali Cartel
David C. Gair. Spanish literature of the Renaissance
Bor-Wen Yang. The Case of Alberto Fujimori
Kate DeMartini: Fuenteovejuna
Vanessa Pino: New York Puerto Rican Attitudes towards Gender, Race and Ethnicity.
Marino Incháustegui: Avant Garde Poetry in the Dominican Republic.
Sonia Szlyk: Love in Literature: A Spanish Perspective.
Jason Kim: Fuenteovejuna.
Erica Prager: Readings in Spanish and Spanish American literature.
Hanh Nguyen (CBB Program in Ecuador) La mujer en Latinoamérica
Aurélie Dauphin (CBB Program in Ecuador) La educación en Ecuador y el género
Julie Jussaume (CBB Program in Ecuador) Educación en Ecuador y oportunidad económica
Teresa Hawko (CBB Program)
2. Statement on Scholarship and Service to the Profession
My higher education started in Spain, at the University of Santiago de Compostela, in 1975--the year General
Franco died. I studied English in a program that emphasized philology over any other consideration or approach
to the learning of a language. It was five years of Latin, Spanish literature, and yes, at the end, English and U.S.
literature. The program lasted five years then, and it provided me with some bases of what I would be doing in
the future. It became also a point of departure.
I graduated in 1980 and I did my licenciatura thesis on the personality of a Spanish intellectual of the 19th century,
José María Blanco-White. He was a Spanish priest of Irish descent whose family had emigrated to Southern Spain
in the aftermath of the Cromwell invasion of Ireland. At the onset of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808,
José María Blanco emigrated to England, where he became an ardent publicist of liberal reforms in Spain,
advocating at the same time for the political emancipation of Spanish America, through the pages of his
newspaper El Español. He also wrote for the abolition of slavery in Cuba, and in this he was also a pioneer. His
political activity would make returning to Spain impossible. Blanco abandoned the Catholic Church and embraced
the Church of England. My thesis focused on one of his tracts against Catholicism, where he presented the
situation of the Spain of his youth in decidedly dark tones. However, a visit to Ireland made him realize the extent
of political and social persecution under the banner of a seemingly reformed and enlightened Church of England.
This made him turn into the Unitarian belief, and reject all forms of state sponsored religion. This was the first
time I had the chance to study a Spanish figure that had been banned from the canon of the national letters.
Blanco-White was a pen name of his own creation. It symbolized in his own opinion a double identity, always
forcing him to make difficult choices and to sustain incomprehension and even hatred. Blanco-White, while in
England, helped establish the basis of the Spanish Romantic movement in the important area of the formation of
aesthetic ideas. He insisted in the importance of the study of the Spanish Middle Ages, where he saw a tension of
ideas and practices that fostered a climate of toleration among people of the three religions of the Book.
My arrival in the United States in 1983 was sponsored by an exchange program between the University of Seville
in Spain and Indiana University, as part of the program of cultural cooperation between the two countries. As I
used to explain at the time, I came here because Spain was bullied into buying war airplanes in the amount of
billions of dollars. I had no intention to be grateful or apologetic. But then I found the University Library at
Indiana, with its ten floors full of books-- five million volumes-- and without windows. I fancied myself in the
mythical library at the center of the Benedictine monastery of Umberto Eco´s The Name of the Rose. I had never
been exposed to open stacks. When I was a small child I used to take the books off the shelves and look at their
bright colors and thin bible paper pages. Such was the pleasure of touching their soft leather bound covers that on
one occasions the rapture reached incontinence proportions and I wet on some of them. Spanish translations of
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Othello, as well as Rubén Darío´s elegant verse still sport the aura of my
infant exhilaration at the sight of books. At age twenty-five I was quite capable of containing myself, but then I
could read in several languages.
As an international graduate student, I was housed in a huge dormitory with 1,300 other graduate students, both
from overseas and the United States. Meals at the cafeteria became excellent occasions to meet new people and
ask what kind of research interest had moved them to the U.S. Midwest. I discovered not only that people studied
things I had never heard of, but also that there were intellectual traditions of which I was absolutely ignorant.
Ignorant of their very existence, that is. I found my ignorance intolerable and challenging. One such intellectual
tradition centered around African American culture. I had read Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright
back in Spain, but among my friends and colleagues in graduate studies at Indiana University I witnessed a
different way of discussing literature and history. I found myself in the middle of passionate discussions around
issues of epistemology itself. Words such as curriculum, canon, cultural domination were new to me. What I
dismissed initially as fancy revisionism became an awareness of the persistent effort to correct historical evidence
present in the African American intellectual tradition. This two-century old intellectual tradition was comparable
to the dissatisfaction with history among great Spanish thinkers like Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset or María
Zambrano. I came to find out how deeply my own country, Spain, had been involved in the creation of the
institution of modern slavery in the Western hemisphere. Readings in Spanish classical literature suddenly came to
my memory as pearls in need of a thread to bind them together. This was the beginning of a scholarly activity that
has presided my life for the last fourteen years. It has become my vocation, and I do not see a closure to it in the future.
My amazement has not ceased since then. My indebtedness to Black American intellectual practices and tradition
cannot be emphasized sufficiently. From Toni Morrison, who came to Indiana to give a lecture before she became
a Nobel Prize laureate and repeated for us that the difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a
navy in front of it, to historian John Hope Franklin, who compared abolition movements in Latin America and the
United States in the 19th century and defined the wars of Spanish American emancipation as racial conflicts in
which Blacks used their political agency to change the course of historical events.
I started reading the unforgettable pages of the scholars of the nineteen thirties and forties who pioneered
Afrohispanic studies in Black colleges and universities. The latter put me on the track of many of the literary
pieces that would be part of my dissertation in Spanish Golden Age literature. Giants like Carter G. Woodson and
Velaurez Spratlin gave evidence of the subsaharian presence in Spanish life during the 16th and 17th centuries.
Few have done so much with so little at their disposal.
Through them I rediscovered the Spanish classics in readings that made Spanish Golden Age literature look very
different. I saw that crazy as Don Quijote was, he could not be fooled by the strange freedom given to old Black
slaves by their insensitive masters all over Spain so they would not have to support an extra mouth. I also realized
that Sancho Panza's dreams of upper mobility in society would be financed by the sale of Black slaves from Africa
in the markets of Seville. Only recently I have found in the archives of the Newberry Library of Chicago a
stupendous document that explains how clear the mind of Miguel de Cervantes was . It is the contract between
the family of Diego Ximénez de Enciso--one of the playwrights who wrote a play with a Black protagonist during
this time--and a shipping company to invest part of the family´s assets on a slave ship. The investment promised to
be very profitable, around 20 percent of the principal. Ximénez de Enciso´s play, Juan Latino, describes the
adventures of a Black slave who wishes to become a Latin scholar and has to overcome the rejection of the entire
academic establishment. He succeeds in that and in the love of a white lady, "whose ugliness gave her freedom to
pursue the study of letters".
The study of the past is always in need of new approaches. Literary studies offer a particular perspective when it
comes to decipher the archeology of what constitutes the present system of knowledge. My love for the Spanish
Golden Age of letters and arts participates from a double awareness. The time and its literary practices were very
different from ours, more than we want to acknowledge many times. The official world of culture still considers
that age four hundred years ago as the "classic" period. On the other hand, the study of the works from the
Golden Age rewards those who approach them with ceaseless joy. Their study, also, happens to continue being relevant.
Doctorado en Lengua y Literatura inglesas. University of Seville.
While completing a master's degree in theoretical linguistics, I was also doing research for my Spanish doctoral
dissertation. It was a semantic analysis of Graham Greene´s novel The Power and the Glory. Those were
structuralist days where binary oppositions seemed the way things were and should be anyway. Two events made
me focus on things slightly less paradigmatic and hierarchical than generative transformational grammar or the
theory of semantic fields. One was a course in sociolinguistics, where I discovered that there are many and better
ways to describe and analyze how people talk and why they do it than through deep structures and surface
structures. The second event changed my life.
Ph. D. Dissertation. University of Indiana.
In my dissertation I reviewd and analyzed Spanish Golden Age texts where Blacks were protagonists, had a
significant part, or where simply mentioned. It became a journey of discovery that still has not ended. I found out
astonishing facts related to the institution of slavery. One could be one third slave and two thirds free in 16th
century Spain. There was a Black poet, Juan Latino, who wrote epic hexameters in Latin and taught the language
in Granada. After almost 500 pages of findings it was time to write some kind of conclusion. My initial ideas on
concepts such as race, national spirit, slavery, literary representation, archetype, stereotype, gender, humor, the
role of humanism in the shaping of the Spanish Empire, and many other topics have changed significantly since
then. I covered issues in the representation of Blacks that ranged from the formation of a stereotype for
Blacks--language, references to skin color, demeaning verbal associations--to the use of Blacks as a literary motif
in Manierist and Baroque poetry.
Scholarly publications
My book La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (The Image of Blacks in Spanish Golden Age
Theater) started as a development from my dissertation. Soon I started thinking in different ways, with the
addition of new critical readings on race theory by authors like Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Orlando Patterson, or Toni
Morrison. Postmodern concepts helped me to approach the phenomenon of sainthood and hagiography. I still
subscribe most of my conclusions of a few years ago, although the analysis of certain passages now would take a
form markedly different. In the 17th century Lope de Vega, who was a consummate propagandist of the Imperial
Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs, was at the same time responsible for the creation of the first full-bodied
Black characters of the Spanish national theater. His comedias with Black saints, studied in my book, offer us not
so much a glimpse of the lives of Blacks in Spain at the time, as a literary document of the attitudes, fears, and
malaise of a society that was building an empire on the shoulders of its enslaved populations-- Blacks and
Indians-- across the sea. This discomfort can be seen in another of Lope's genial creations, the character of the
Mulatto servant girl. Always different, resourceful, and witty, she represents what should not have been,
illegitimate unions. Blacks in Spanish Golden Age theater were the creation of white authors. As creations they
had to conform to certain patterns that were neither innocent nor particularly accurate as to what Blacks in the
street thought or did. As a matter of fact, Black protagonist characters served the purpose of upholding the status
quo of a Hispanic Monarchy that promoted the enslavement of Blacks under the guise of saving their souls.
Blacks characters on the stage defend that same Monarchy and its principles as if they were acting on free accord.
At the same time comic relief Black graciosos and graciosas act as the foil to the more "serious" Black
counterparts. Unlike their white counterparts, Black graciosos are not bearers of a certain truth of life, but rather
they represent the moral degradation all Blacks represented in the minds of Spanish whites. If serious Blacks on
stage are said to have white souls inside Black bodies, the graciosos are a dialectic device to remind the audience
that the Black hero is after all just Black. The reader of these pages can find more information on La imagen de los
negros... in the book reviews that are included in the appendices of this statement.
My scholarly articles have appeared in some important journals, such as Hispania, Romance Quarterly,
Afro-Hispanic Review , Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures, Bulletin of the Comediantes, etc.. For the most
part they are part of my research in the field of prose and poetry, where there are no major works where Blacks
and their conditions appear prominently. However, these articles stress the preoccupation Spanish society had
with this newly arrived population on Spanish soil and the ethical dilemmas slavery created.
Of all the figures, Lazarillo de Tormes' stepfather, Zaide, and Sancho Panza stand as natural opposites in this
moral drama. The former is the first Black character in Western European literature that is accorded moral agency
and individuality: he steals out of love and responsibility for his family, and society punishes him for it, without
reminding itself that by enslaving Zaide, it was robbing him of the product of his work. Sancho Panza represents
the typical individual in that society, who intends to become rich, respectable and even reach nobility from the
product of enslaving and selling Black Africans.
My two articles on Zaide, the stepfather of the protagonist of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), represent the first
attempt at analyzing this figure that had never received more than a passing mention in the thousands of articles
and hundreds of books dedicated by scholars and intellectuals alike to this canonical text of Spanish literature.
In"El negro Zaide: marginación social y textual en el Lazarillo" I focus on the fact that not only Zaide is a Black
man, but he is the most important male figure in the upbringing of the protagonist. He gives him love, food, and
stability, but in the end the protagonist will denounce his stepfather to the authorities. Zaide makes Lázaro aware
that he is white and yet he depends on a Black man for his sustenance. His sense of shame at his step brother is
resolved in the expression of racial prejudice through one of the most famous anecdotes in the entire book. Zaide
and Lázaro´s mother have a little child who, at one point--as soon as he learns to speak--becomes frightened at
the sight of his own Black father. I discuss in this article the implausibility of this situation and also the long
tradition it helped start, that of the Black individual who is unaware of his or her own body. It reaches
fromLazarillo´s Zaide to Zora Neale Hurston. In my other article, "La identidad de Zaide y la parodia del amor
cortés en el Lazarillo de Tormes," I focused on the figure of Zaide himself, as a parody of the courtly lover. I
proposed a thesis in which the Black slave Zaide is a demetaphorization of the literary topos of the slave for love
in courtly love literature. The rhetoric of suffering, torture and separation from the beloved lady has in the case of
Zaide a side of shocking unrhetorical truth to it. He is a slave, he loves a poor white woman, he serves her and
takes care of her needs, and he is punished for it. He is whipped and hot fat is poured on the open wounds-- the
typical punishment reserved to Black slaves for their crimes and misdemeanors.
My articles on Sancho Panza's dreams of becoming a slave trafficker also focus on an adventure that the profuse
scholarly literature on Don Quijote (1605-1615) did not dwell upon. In "El disfraz de Dorotea: usos del cuerpo
negro en la España de Cervantes" I analyze the self-fashioning of a female character in the first part of the novel,
Dorotea, as a maid in distress who seeks the help of Don Quijote. It is all a hoax, and to signal it, she appears in
front of the Don as an African princess whose kingdom has been usurped by a dark skinned giant. Her story is an
ironic reading of the novels of chivalry with a racial twist that does not escape the attention of Sancho. In "Sancho
Panza y la esclavización de los negros" I discuss the double vision of Africa in the Renaissance, a mythical land of
adventure for Don Quijote, but for Sancho Panza a real geographical place where slaves are captured and
transformed into gold. The history of the period, the development of an international slave trade between Africa,
Europe and the Americas and the absent-minded cover up of humanism and religion are some of the features that
Cervantes exposes without sermons, but rather sardonically. He had been himself a slave in Algiers for five years.
The article on Sancho Panza as a would-be slave owner has been reprinted recently in the La Ceiba, a Spanish
journal on Afro-Hispanoamerican Cultural Studies.
I have approached the study of the representation of Black women in Spanish Golden Age literature through a
slightly different perspective. There is only one literary protagonist in the entire period to my knowledge, the
Queen of Sheba in Calderón´s La sibila de Oriente. I instead decided to focus on the minor female characters of
the theater, since they provide more glimpses into the historical events of slavery in Spain than male characters do.
Their setting is always a domestic one, but one that is always threatened with expulsion into harsher
lifestyles--work in the soap factories, or prostitution. My interpretation of the representation of Black women in
the Spanishcomedia followed the theoretical model of Gayle Rubin's view of women throughout history as
negotiating their own lives in a patriarchal order where men exchange power among themselves through them. My
application of this thesis to the case of slave women is supported by historical evidence and by cases of literary
representations, as I discuss in "The Condition of Black Women in Spain during the Renaissance," an article
included in Black Women in America, a collection of studies that cover a variety of intellectual fields, historical
periods, and locations. The racialization of Black women in the Americas started five hundred years ago in
Europe. Social attitudes and artistic representations of Renaissance Spain towards Black women sailed far and
apart. Literary representation of the first complex women of African descent in Europe took the form of a stock
character, themulata, or Mulatto woman, as I discussed in chapter two of my book. A woman can be the
exchange token between a rich white man and his poor white servant, if the rich man marries the rich white
woman who owns the Mulatto servant woman. In this exchange, however, the Mulatto servant woman is not
passive at all, but rather manipulates the situation to her best advantage, in this case, the prize of legal marriage,
rather than a fleeting extramarital affair. But conversely, as I indicate in my article "The Black Body Against Its
Interpretation," the opposite happened in Spanish literary representations of Black women. The body of the Black
woman becomes the site of every abysmal desire. She is the antithesis of the Petrarchan canon of feminine beauty,
and the ultimate focus of masculine heterosexual anxiety about the social, religious, and racial forbidden.
In the article "Cuestiones de limpieza étnica" (Questions of ethnic cleansing) I discuss the play Juan Latino,
written by Diego Ximénez de Enciso. This play is an excellent example to make the case for the formation of a
discourse of racial prejudice in Spain and its empire during the Renaissance and the Baroque periods. Blacks are
pitted against the descendants of Jews and the Muslim minority--the moriscos--who had been victims of the
second mass expulsion of an ethnic minority from Spanish soil in a period of over a century. The glorification of
the Empire is done through the presentation of a Black Latin scholar-- based on the historical Juan Latino, author
of the Latin epic poem Austriadis carmen-- who gives credence and moral justification to the politics of ethnic
hatred against the descendants of Jews and Muslims. In this same line is my most recent article-- forthcoming this
winter-- on the question of race and gender in the play Virtudes vencen señales (Virtue overcomes signs), by the
playwright of Jewish descent Luis Vélez de Guevara. I argue that the Black prince hidden in the tower by his
father and later recognized as heir of the emblematic kingdom of Albania-- read Spain wanting to be white-- is an
emblem for the social group of the conversos, or people of Jewish descent. The playwright exposes in front of his
royal patrons the plight of his social group: thoroughly Spanish in culture and even religion, yet like the Black
protagonist, denied of rights and membership in the national community. A blemish for which they cannot be held
responsible for-- skin color, ethnic ancestry-- is the basis of a social organization that has cast aside the principle
of virtue in the individual in favor of the prejudice of the majority. This society-- Spain-- was in danger.
Connected to my work on the CD-Rom of Fuenteovejuna, I have written a more theoretical study on the role of
the female protagonist, Laurencia. Through a queer reading, I establish that the masculine elements Lope de Vega
creates in this character are subversive in ways that modern interpreters of the work have found difficult to accept.
I study the made-for-television production of the play, in which Laurencia is feminized to a higher degree than in
the original text of the 17th century. I also maintain that in post-Franco Spain a Lesbian reading of this character is
too conflictive. The masculinization of Laurencia is made through the recourse of race. In a scene that has little
textual support in Lope´s play, she and the other women who attack the rapist overlord appear with their faces
painted movie-like African fashion, in order to signify their "otherness."
Current scholarly projects
My current scholarship is moving me into new fields and discourses, but the focus reamins the same. I am trying
to reconstruct the steps in the formation of a racist discourse in Spain and its American empire. History is always
present when one deals with the literary images of Blacks in the Spanish Renaissance and Baroque. I have been
working on two projects for the last two and a half years now. One involves the life of an African nun who lived in
Spain between the 1680s and 1740s, Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo, born Chicaba in West Africa. She is,
to my knowledge, the first African born woman writer in Europe of whom we know name and circumstances. I
am working on a critical edition of the hagiography published in 1752 by her last confessor, as well as in archival
work to try to find some more of what she wrote, of which precious little is left. The life written about her is an
extraordinary document because its author is grappling the subject of miracles in the age of Enlightenment-this
African nun could burn the Devil himself with her own spit, and stop the bombs from falling by showing a devout
print outside her cell window. In my study I intend to pay particular attention to the formation of a racial
discourse in Spain and its Empire, and how the 18th century scientific justification of racial prejudice was a
development that cannot not be understood without the existence of a discourse of racial prejudice based on
religious and moral arguments. An initial study has been published in the Spanish journal La Ceiba. A shorter
version of it was presented in Havana, Cuba, in December of 1998 at an International Conference on Slavery in
Spain. My work on Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo will occupy my sabbatical period from August to
December of 2000.
My second project is a study of the intellectual and personal adventure of two Capuchin friars--Francisco José de
Jaca and Epifanio de Moirans-- who, in the 1680s, denounced slavery in Cuba and paid a heavy price for it. They
demanded the abolition of slavery, and the payment of reparations to all Blacks living in the Spanish American
colonies. Their writings denouncing the atrocities committed against the Black enslaved population became an
embarrassment for the Church and the civil authorities, and their case reached Rome itself. This case sheds light
into the little known world of ideas about slavery in Colonial Spanish America. Attention to the works of these
two friars is most urgent. They were abolitionists avant la lettre, as part of an intellectual tradition initiated by
Bartolomé de las Casas and others of prophetic oposition to the colonization of the Americas. Their case was
silenced so effectively that a scholar of the category of British historian Hugh Thomas did not even record their
names in his 1997 comprehensive study of the Atlantic slave trade. (4)
The study of the ideological debates and discursive practices around slavery in Colonial Latin America is an area
that at the present moment is in need of scholarly attention. My interest in the figures of the Capuchins Jaca and
Moirans is motivated by my belief in the need to build interdisciplinary bridges between the study of Latin
American and Spanish literature and culture. I have approached the study of the racial discourse of the Inquisition
against people of African descent both in Spain and in Latin America. Forthcoming is a study I have completed on
how literary and legal discourses on both sides of the Atlantic worked to deny Blacks a place in society. In this
study I present also the case of the answer to this discourse by Blacks voices: free Blacks who demand their right
to be equals, and demands of freedom of Blacks and Mulattoes in Ecuador during the 17th and 18th centuries.
I will use the first part of my sabbatical period to finish my second book, which is now near completion. It will
consist of a series of essays on the representation of Blacks in Spanish and Spanish American letters in different
genres: poetry, prose, theater, and polemical essay. The book will collect some of the unpublished work that I
have presented at lectures conferences in the past few years. My concept of literature, of course, expands to more
rhetorical practices than the three canonical genres. The discourse of the Inquisition, or the practice of theological
controversy, construct a Black individual that participates of some of the characteristics of the Blacks created by
playwrights and comic poets. If the latter used stereotype astheir main poetic technique, the former also devised
equally monolithic views of Blacks-both good and bad-that somehow became unglued by events. Rebellions,
subversive activities, labor disputes with masters gave the lie to attempts to control the representation of Blacks
and their reality as one of submission and acceptance of their inferior status in society.
Other service to the Academic community outside Bates.
3. Service to Bates College
When I came to Bates College in 1994, the Spanish program had survived a serious crisis in personnel. The new
facutly joined Professor Francisca López, as the sole survivor of a series of rapid turnovers. New additions made
the growth of the Spanish section a reality in number of students, quality and quantity of senior theses, and
academic exposure of our program beyond he walls of Hathorn Hall. I took as my personal task to make Spanish
present in as many academic areas of the College as I could manage. The strength continues to this day, with a
significant increase in the number of our majors and secondary concentration candidates.
Having been at Bates College for fiveyears, the list of my service contributions to the Bates community may look
thinner than if I had been here for a longer period. However, I take pride in the activities that I initiated, my
involvement in activities related to student cultural life, and the promotion of Bates College beyond the confines of
our city and state. I have been involved both with faculty and students in service beyond my pedagogical duties.
In the Fall of 1999 I served as co-director of the CBB Program in Quito, Ecuador. We took 12 students from the
three colleges to an inaugural experience that involved new challenges for me. To my academic duties as a teacher
of two courses, I had to add the important functions of academic advisor, ad-hoc Dean of Students, travel agent,
guide, etc. The success of the program at every level has increased my commitment to both this particular
program and the entire CBB philosophy. For more details of this program and its activities, see APPENDIX F
During the Winter and Fall semesters of 1997 I became quite active in the debates around the General Education
Requirements that were under discussion and ended being voted down by the Faculty. Two areas caught my
interest and attention at that time. The foreign language requirement, and the ammendment to the multicultural
requirement. My contributions to the debate were the product of meetings and close study of proposals and
opposing points of view. The result of the vote was perhaps less important than the exercise in participatory
democracy, by which all the Faculty of the College learned from one another about differing points of view, and
thus advance in the future transformation of the College curriculum.
I have contributed to the renovation of the curriculum in the Spanish program with the creation of nine new courses or short term units in the five years I have taught at Bates. In the area of Spanish Medieval studies, my two new courses contribute also to the curriculum of the Classical and Medieval Studies program. My new courses have been aimed at the development of interdisciplinarity and a true multicultural, and academically rigorous curriculum.
Teaching Spanish at Bates College is no different from teaching it elsewhere in the U.S. in one single respect, the
increasing enrollments in both the language and literature classes. On many occasions I have had to accept
students in my classes beyond the established limit, due to the interest and academic excellence in the study of
Spanish among Bates students. I have directed, or am directing, nine independent studies with students inside and
outside the Spanish major.During my short term leave in 1997 I accepted an independent short term study at the
request of the Chair of the Department, since it was an emergency, due to the resignation of Prof. Rosman and the
departure for Cuba of Professor López. The list of thesis, both of one semester and honors, that appear at the end
of this chapter is proof of my commitment to the academic welfare of our students.
Working with students, fellow faculty, and administrators at Bates Colleges has been a source of gratification and
learning. One of the most gratifying moments took place in the Fall of 1996, with the production of Miguel de
Cervantes Saavedra´s El retablo de las maravillas, codirected by Mr. Pithamber Polsani and myself. This was the
first time a play entirely in Spanish was ever produced in the College. Students, the majority of whom were
notnative speakers, Professor López and myself took the different roles of this version of the Emperor´s new
clothes with a racial bent. The production, at the Benjamin Mays Center, was a complete success with the public,
and we became cultural poster boys and girls in Bates publications the following semester.
As a reward to the students who worked so hard in the play, and whose work was not part of any course, I organized a trip to New York City in the following days to attend theater productions in Spanish. The enthusiasm that these activities generated in the students took the form of a senior thesis the following semester, Ms. DiPietro´s, where some members of the Retablo´s cast participated in the performance part of her thesis on madness in literature.
I have continued my advising and participation in the weekly Spanish table every semester I have been on Campus. It is my practice to direct students in my language courses to attend the Table as part of their regular curricular activities.
I participated in all the search committees in Spanish that I was elegible for, and also in the search committee for
the tenure-track position in Classics. This last one alone involved the reading of over 180 dossiers and discuss the
merits of each candidate.I also participated in the interviews for Spanish positions at the MLA conventions in
Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, in the first of which I also was scheduled to read two academic papers.
Shortly after my arrival, I was involved in two departmental reviews. One took place in Classcal and Romance
Languages and Literatures, and the other in Classical and Medieval Studies. In both I was involved in writing
responses to both the internal and external committees.
I participated in the Classical and Medieval Studies summer institute. I was also involved in the preliminary work
of selection of texts and topics. I hope to continue contributing to this program in the future, strengthening it, and
the study of the Spanish Middle Ages.
I wrote two successful grant proposals to obtain 10,000 dollars from the Ladd Family Annual Collection
Development Fund, which were subsequently approved. We have used the money to update important areas
where library holdings were inadequate for the offerings of our Spanish curriculum. I have also been instrumental
in securing part of a book collection offered by Mexican author Rosamaría Roffiel to our Library.
In 1996 I used a development grant from the College to acquire audiovisual materials during my periodic vacation
visits to Spain. In total, I have purchased more than 100 new titles of films from Latin America and Spain for the
Ladd Library and the Spanish program in my Department. These titles are actively used by my colleagues, our
students, and myself in the development of our courses.
In the Summer of 1995 I attended a four day technology workshop at Middlebury College sponsored by the CBB
Mellon Foundation. Subsequent to this workshop, I have been involved in the activities of the CBB consortium
for the application of new technologies to language teaching. I have been active in advising and consulting with
the language center personnel on new aids to pedagogy, as well as in the creation of the Fuenteovejuna CD-ROM.
In terms of service, I see my role in this area increasing in the future at Bates College. Judicious application of
technology to language teaching is the responsibility of those who teach languages on an everyday basis, which is
the case of the Spanish Bates faculty.
I participate actively as a faculty member in the different activities organized by the Multicultural Center. I have
helped with several of its inititatives, which include the diversification of academic offerings on Campus. Through
the MCC I have helped organize two short term units, one on Brazil, and the other on Spain and Morocco. I have
contributed to the MCC publication, Cultural Times.
I became the de-facto advisor to the Spanish House during its brief existence during the academic year
1996-1997.La Casa became a catalyst for cultural activities around the Spanish language, and its demise was
lamented publicly by members of the student body in the Student newspaper.
I participated in the ad-hoc committee for Minority Student Retention, and also I have convened with the
President and other members of the Bates Community on an ad-hoc discussion group on diversity.
I have contributed to the student group Solidaridad Latina with ideas and time in the organization of 1997's Latino
Awareness Month. I coordinated the efforts to bring to Bates College the internationally-known Cuban musical
group Mezcla. They performed to great success of public attendance on November 18-19. The presence of the
group also involved teaching sessions in several departments and programs, including Music, and Afro-American Studies.
In January of 1999 I was able to bring the musical group Bellita and Jazztumbatá to Bates College directly from
Havana, Cuba. Their preformance in the Olin Arts Auditorium was a historical one. The three members of the
group, all accomplished musicians and musicologists, were able to offer their knowledge to students of different
departments during their week-long stay on Campus.
The reception of the CD-rom proposal for Fuenteovejuna presented by Professor Pithamber Polsani and me to the
CBB Mellon Foundation has been enthusiastic Colleagues in our fellow institutions who teach languages had the
oportunity to see a demosntration during a CBB Mellon Fair in the Spring of 1999. The project is practically
finished at this point. Professor Polsani, now at the University of Arizona, and presented our project at the
International Golden Age Theater Symposium in El Paso in March 1998.
I organized the presence of speakers for the Hispanic Lecture series, an event I created with scholars in the field of Spanish and Latin American literature and culture:
• 1994 Professor Nina Menendez, Gender and Sexuality in Cuban Fiction by Women.
• 1996 Professor Edward Baker, Don Quijote's Library
I have participated in two Honors exam committees
1995 1 (Member)
1997 1 (Chair)
1999 1 (Chair)
1 (Member)
In 1995 I was made the academic advisor of 14 first year students for the first time. I have been the academic
advisor of several senior Spanish majors since my appointment for the tenure-track position in 1995, as well as
advisor to the usual group of 12 to 14 freshmen and sophomores every year.
I also continue to serve in two committees, Classical and Medieval Studies, and Lecture Series.
At the request of the Dean of the College, I also participated in theT.G.I.F. Lecture series: " The Denial of
Blackness in Latin America: Past and Present." October 3, 1997. That year's series was organized in response to
the national conversation on race called upon by the President of the Republic, Mr. William J. Clinton.
Future direction of my service at Bates College
List of Committees in which I have served at Bates College:
• Presidential Advisory Committee, 1995-1996
• Classical and Medieval Studies, 1995-
• Lecture Series Committee, 1997-
Community at large:
I was a Board Member of the Lewiston-Auburn AIDS coalition between 1997 and 1998.
I have volunteered time and services to the Hispanic workers' at DeCoster farms in their effort to organize
effective ways to make the company's management more responsible.
1. 0Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes. Temple of Confession: Mexican Beasts and Living Santos. New York: Powerhouse Books, 1997. I also found a similar example in one of our textbooks for intermediate Spanish, Interacciones. In one of the chapters the authors offered examples of how to conduct a conversation with "your" Spanish-speaking maid. This textbook is no longer used in our Department.
2. 0Ángel Rama, The Lettered City. Edited and translated by John Charles Chasteen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
3. 0Américo Castro, El Pensamiento de Cervantes. Mary Gossy. "Dulcinea as Butch." in ¿Entiendes?***
4. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. New York. Simon and Schuster, 1997.