From Left: ASU undergraduate students Lindsey Blare (Middle Grades Education/Army Reserves), John Bradley (History/Marine Reserves), Restaurant Owner (name unknown), Dr. Jeff Bortz (Faculty Mentor/History) and Paul Holcomb (Secondary Education) stop for a lunch break in Mexico City as part of the Office of Student Research – International Student Research Grant Program.
For the complete story, please read below:
The Delights of Failure
Jeffrey Bortz
During its first year, the new General Education program proposed that faculty develop linked courses across the disciplines. With that guideline, Patrick Rardin (Philosophy), Gayle Weitz (Art) and I created three classes on the truth from different disciplinary perspectives. After we submitted our proposal, GenEd sent a rebuke to our respective chairs that berated us for the links. We had failed. Discouraged, Patrick and Gayle withdrew their proposals. Having more experience with letters of reprimand from ASU and their truth content, I decided to forge ahead with my class. Despite a late start for the spring semester, with Neva's help we managed to offer History 3541, The Truth in History and the Truth of History: The Case of Mexico’s Revolution. In short order, an eager and intelligent group of students enrolled.
The class examined philosophical issues surrounding truth claims, ranging from language to verification arguments. It also explored the truth content of a variety of sources, including music (the revolutionary cockroach in La Cucaracha), film (The Harder They Come), novel (The Old Gringo), and autobiography (Insurgent Mexico). The sources covered the kinds of documents historians find in the archives, for which I provided some papers that I had used for my most recent book, Revolution within the Revolution: Cotton Textile Workers and the Mexican Labor Regime, 1910-1923 (Stanford, 2008). I tried to contrast the truth of Quine with the truth of Zapata. It was an exciting course filled with lively debate and sharp insight.
Amidst the liveliness, students commented that they would love to accompany me on a trip to the Mexican archives to see how historians carry out their research. I didn't give much thought to such utopian ideas until ASU's Office of Student Research (OSR), directed by Al Utter, announced a competition for student grants to assist in faculty research projects. Two students from the truth class, Lindsey Blare, a member of the Army National Guard, and Paul Holcomb, a Teaching Fellow, applied, as did a student from my Mexico history class, John Bradley, a U.S. Marine Corps reservist. Much to my later surprise, the OSR awarded them grants to go to Mexico for a week to work with me in the archives.
At the close of the semester, I flew to Mexico City to begin work on my next project, “From Victory to Defeat: Gangsters, Workers, and Citizens in Mexico’s Labor Regime, 1923-1959.” When I arrived in the city, I began to realize the problems of taking care of three ASU students who had never been to Mexico nor spoke fluent Spanish. Mexico City, with a population of close to twenty-five million, had become extremely dangerous. Drug lords are powerful, the police corrupt, murders and kidnappings commonplace, robberies rampant, and gringos stand out as……gringos and thus targets. When I met the students at the airport, I explained the situation and laid out the ground rules for survival.
The next day we set out to work in the Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, located in a 17th century convent that is named for the brother of Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, the President deposed by Porfirio Diaz, himself deposed thirty years later by Mexican revolutionaries. The Lerdo is quite a long walk, perhaps three miles, from the hotel, so we stopped every morning at a half way point, the Café Habana, where reputedly Fidel Castro and Che Guevara planned the Cuban revolution while drinking Mexico’s finest traditional coffee. At the archive, John, Lindsey, and Paul were great. Armed with digital cameras, they became adept at copying many hundreds of documents relating to labor problems in post revolutionary Mexico. Outside the archive, they were also adept at taking care of each other and keeping themselves safe and out of trouble. They were a delight to travel with, to work with, and to enjoy an occasional domino in a neighboring cantina. We celebrated the end of the week by going to lucha libre, the wrestling events so loved by Mexico City aficionados. We also took a day to visit Cuernavaca, where Hernan Cortez built the castle in which he poisoned his first wife, and the Franciscans built a magnificent Cathedral where they read the Requirimiento in Latin to Nahuatl-speaking Indians before converting the willing and massacring the unwilling.
Lindsey wrote about the trip, “The trip was more than I expected it to be. Initially, I was a little apprehensive about the whole thing. I mean really, going to a dangerous city, a group of guys I really don’t know all that well, in a country with a language I don’t speak…recipe for disaster right? I was impressed by how we all took care of each other. What did I get out of the trip?.... This was my first trip out of the country and as such a true immersion into a foreign culture. Being fully conscious of how people looked at me and us made me very much aware of my behavior, dress, and mannerisms and what made me different..….The research…. process was meticulous, and showed me a great deal about the effort involved in truly in-depth research and study…..”
John added that "I learned a great deal on archival work and the atmosphere in which it takes place. The area in which the experience was the most valuable was in cultural education as well as the insights and knowledge provided while researching and talking over meals." Quiet Paul said “it was great.”
I believe that the overall experience was useful to the students, to me, and to ASU. The students learned the basics of archival research and some of the skills necessary to carry it out. They now understand what it takes for historians to go from primary sources to books. They learned a lot about Mexico City and even more about themselves as world travelers. For me, the project yielded copies of hundreds of documents that will eventually find their way into my next book. It was also one of the most interesting, and in the end, delightful undergraduate teaching experiences of my career. The lucha libre was spectacular. For ASU, we now have three seniors prematurely ready for graduate and professional school, three students who embody our commitment to internationalization of the curriculum.
In the end, I had to thank the Provost, Stan Aeschleman, and the Director of the OSR, Al Utter, for their joint commitment to undergraduate research. They made this experience possible. I am grateful to Neva for slipping the truth class into the spring offering at the last minute, and to Pat and Gayle for helping me to think about the truth in a more truthful fashion. But most of all, I am grateful to General Education, which got me started in teaching the truth, and for teaching me that the truth of failure is sometimes success, just as the truth of success is sometimes failure.