The five interviews that make up The (Latin) American Scene offer to readers, however inadvertently, an especially timely if stark occasion for reflection on the current state and uncertain future of the field of Latin-Americanist criticism and humanistic scholarship in the North American university and public sphere.

Convened and guided with great acumen and rhetorical skill by Fernando Gómez Herrero, they were initially recorded between twenty and twenty-five years ago. In the course of conversations with Gómez Herrero, Walter Mignolo, Rolena Adorno, José Rabasa, John Beverley and Roberto González Echevarría, then all senior, well-established academics and by now all well into retirement age—if in many instances still active scholars—reflect back on the state of the field dating from a point in time as early as three decades before that.

Meanwhile, however, as this is being written (ca. February 2025) the United States and with it the world are witnessing what will surely be remembered as one of the most signal and disastrous turning points in its modern, twenty-first-century history: Donald Trump's return to head a state over which he now makes good to exercise almost unlimited control. Whatever the particulars of the new, far-right, quite arguably neofascist, ethno-supremacist polity that now consolidates itself, joining similarly autocratic if nominally “democratic” regimes across the globe, from Italy to Argentina to India and from the Philippines to Hungary to Russia, the effect here is to cast an unaccustomed and lurid light over a subset of academic and intellectual life whose very chronological double remove suddenly makes it seem weirdly even more particular and remote: speaking from a generation ago at a point in the United States and global history when, whatever its own catastrophic and dystopian aspects, our contemporary civilizational collapse (surely the term is justified) would have been scarcely imaginable, the informants responding to Gómez Herrero's adroit and always provocative questions and prompts—often as illuminating and compelling as the words they elicit if not at times a good deal more so—reflect back in turn on a still earlier, preceding generation.

The Training of González Echevarría.

FGH: What would you like to remember about your training years (BA University of South Florida (1964), MA Indiana University (1966), PhD Yale (1970)?

RGE: I have very pleasant memories of professors who were key in my training. At the University of South Florida, these professors did not produce a big written work, but they were great teachers. I am thinking of Edward McClean, Charles Micareli, Adrian Cherry and others in French and Italian. At Indiana, I had the good fortune of being a student of Miguel Enguíanos, a brilliant and warm professor from Valencia with whom I would spend hours talking in his office when I was twenty years old, which is when I started graduate school. Octavio Corbalán, a subtle Argentinian from Tucumán was also there. He wrote about “postmodernismo,” because that is how it was called [already in the 1960s]. and he taught me a lot of things about writing style. I was lucky because that was a moment of growth in the department. Américo Castro passed through to give a talk. Ana María Matute gave a course about fiction-writing. I studied with her. Antonio Ferres, Ignacio Aldecoa, Rosario Castellanos, etc. Lots of writers went through the department and I learned a lot from them. I learned a lot from a Mexican professor, Ortigoza by name, who gave very detailed courses on the Golden Age [period] and from Quentin Hope, a professor of XVII French theater. Prof. Houston who gave an excellent seminar on Proust. When I arrived at Yale, it was the beginning of the boom of structuralism. I was student of Hispanists such as [the Spaniard] Manuel Durán, who was my dissertation advisor, the Cuban José Arrom, the Colombian Gustavo Correa and others who were visiting professors. [I studied] in French with Jacques Ehrmann, who sadly died very young. He was one among those who gave entrance to structuralism in the U.S. via Yale and the journal Yale French Studies that published a very important issue at that time. Because I have always been between Spanish, French and Italian, it was also the Italian professor John Freccero. At some point, Paul de Man arrived. I attended the classes of Harold Bloom.

The Professional History of Rolena Adorno.

FGH: What would you like to recall in relation to your training (BA U of Iowa, Spanish, 1964; MA privatim Yale U, 1966; PhD Cornell U, Spanish Literature [sic], 1974)?

RA: I think that the undergraduate experience was really key in my case because I came from a nonacademic family, no one having gone to the university before. And, for me, to discover the humanities, and the study of the Spanish language and literature, although I came to it late, was the most important educational experience I had. What was attractive to me about it was that it was so different from my own cultural background. I had that interest in something that was very different from that which I had known and from which I had come. What sealed that interest for me, although I was trained to be a secondary school teacher and did teach one year, in fact one year after I graduated from college, was the opportunity to have a Fulbright scholarship to Spain. That changed what was already a serious interest, not quite on the spot but over the course of that year in Madrid, into a lifelong commitment and a lifelong passion that I didn't yet know how to give shape to because I married right after that Fulbright year and took over the raising of my husband's four daughters and couldn't yet quite see myself going through graduate school. But I did. It was a natural consequence with very much the support of my family and my husband, David [Adorno] and the girls. The very remarkable master's degree from Yale, is simply the last degree because one has to have a Yale graduate degree in order to be a member of the Yale permanent faculty. So, this in privatim degree is in fact a ceremonial one that means that I teach at Yale as a member of the permanent faculty. My PhD years at Cornell were wildly different than [anything] I had thought they might have been. Simply because I started out looking to study something that I knew something about, which was the theater of Golden-Age Spain as is called, the comedia del Siglo de Oro, and in the course of centering on that historical period the advice given to me was to take a course in the colonial area.

I am proposing the staging of five critical conversations in the original context of the American academy in the United States. My interlocutors are Walter D. Mignolo, John Beverley, Rolena Adorno, José Rabasa and Roberto González Echevarría. These are undoubtedly five influential names whose scholarly work asks for re-readings and re-framings as we look both ways, that is, toward the immediate past, the 1980s onwards, and the more distant past, Early Modern/colonial times, and to be sure toward the ominous future inside the few embedded fragilities, institutional and otherwise, of a present crisis informing the foreign humanities. This precarity is true state of affairs in the United States and elsewhere, but I want to focus, for now, on the troubles of the super-power and its tentacular institutions of higher learning inside which we must imagine these five noted names. By foreign humanities, I mean to invoke the double consciousness of DuBois-pedigree that takes into account the insufficiencies of the immediate, native, hegemonic or mainstream, dominant-national official circumstance inside which an emergence of a possibly different and desirable foreign dimension or horizon may take place (”extranjero” and “extranjerizante” in Spanish within and against conventionally xenophobic frames of intelligibility, also present inside university settings). Affirmations of foreignness must therefore make any form of nativism incomplete and undesirable. This is one book, and there are two others that should follow soon.

What I am doing here? I am seeking critical “humanistic” intelligence and one thousand thoughts and feelings wrapped around myriad avatars of university life in our tumultuous times. The time frame begins in the 1980s and reaches us today. Things come out when things come out, and some of these conversations have selectively surfaced partially previously or not at all in the previous two decades. Three took place in Spanish (Mignolo, Rabasa, González Echevarría), and two in English (Beverley, Adorno). The website of the book for Anthem Press includes the original audios [The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect (anthempress.com)]. Both versions (print and audio) will play, I am sure, in the bilingual imagination of those invested in translation and interpretation studies, but this is only the beginning. There is so much more: a rich landscape of scholarship and criticism in the foreign humanities in the vicinity of the Hispanophone sectors within, and perhaps against Anglophone hegemonies.

The Training of José Rabasa.

FGH: What are some important moments in your training? BA in Philosophy and Literature from Universidad de las Américas (1971); MA in Philosophy from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1978); PhD in the Program of History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1985). What would you like to remember now?

JR: I may want to remember my interdisciplinary orientation at the beginning. It was literatura and philosophy intimately connected. My work in Mexico was frustrated at the graduate level. This was due to a series of grotesque situations. I had to let that go or rather I could not find time to make it work. I was doing my MA with Ramón Xirau who underwent a paranoia after an intimate friend of his, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at UNAM, was assassinated. A very tense situation was created. He almost walled himself in his house and you had to go to see him and it was not easy to get in. I don't know if we could make it public, but I am answering your question. It is important in the sense that I had to leave it behind. My CV registers a thesis that I never defended for various reasons. It was impossible. It was 1978 and I had been completing my graduate studies at UNAM since 1971. Several things happened: I obtained a post in Morelia at the Universidad San Nicolás Hidalgo, which got interrupted for the writing of the thesis. I spent several months trying to structure the defense of the thesis that never happened. The possibility to go to Santa Cruz came up. Instead of waiting in Mexico for another semester seeking the possibility of defending the thesis, I left it behind. Santa Cruz had important changes. There was a very interesting group. Hayden White had arrived. James Clifford was beginning to work on the history of anthropology. In connection to the colonial Latin American context, Jorge Klor de Alva was also there. This was an interesting trio. In the field of Latin American literature, Marta Morelo Froschi, whose suggestions and interventions were very useful, was also there.

About Formative Stages.

FGH: What are the fundamental stages in your education? What early biographical data would you like to include?

WM: They are all important. I begin with primary and secondary. I should mention a small place in Argentina, Corral de Bustos, and then the Universidad Nacional in Cordoba from 1961 to 1962 until 1968. I started studying philosophy there. I passed through anthropology and ended up completing modern languages. In 1969, I obtained a fellowship and I went to France to complete my graduate studies in semiology and literary theory. I completed my PhD in France in 1974 and then I quit studying (laughter).

FGH: You came to the U.S. in 1974?

WM: Yes. I finished [my studies] and I came here. I came before finishing for a bit, but it is unimportant.

FGH: What are the periods in your intellectual training? Initially, I would mention three: the structural-semiologist “French” Mignolo, although you no longer publicize this period too much. I confess I do not know it well […]

WM: This first period is already gone, although I still like, with the benefit of the distance, the writing of my doctoral dissertation, which two years later, generated the first book. It is the semiological period, discourse analysis and literary theory. I was writing this sort of thing until 1986-1987, although there is already a period in 1980-1981, in which I publish an article “Cartas, Crónicas y Relaciones” [“Letters, Chronicles, Narration”] in which I begin to go into the colonial question. But I do so not through colonialism, but in relation to the question, “What was history like and what was it like to write about it in the XVI century in relation to Western Indies (“Indias Occidentales”)”? This was 1981. And this took me to write the book The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization [orig. 1995 (Second edition 2003)]. But first things first: I wrote three books in my semiological period, focusing on literary theory and discourse analysis: Elements for a theory of the literary text [Elementos para una teoría del texto literario] in 1978, Modern Text and Metaphor [Texto Moderno y Metáfora] in 1984 and Textual Theory and Textual Interpretation [Teoría del Texto e Interpretación del Texto] in 1986.

The History of John Beverley.

FGH: What would you like to recall as salient points in your training and formative years? [BA at Princeton (1964) and PhD in California, San Diego (1972)]? (Birth: Venezuela, 1943). What would you say your most important moments in between those two places are?

JB: I probably started getting interested in literature when I was in prep school. Apart from having brought up in Latin America, I have a conventional childhood. My father was a Republican businessman. In the late 1950s, there was existentialism and the Beat generation, so I started getting interested in this kind of material, especially the Beats. Because I spent a lot of time in Latin America and also after the Cuban Revolution that made Spanish and Latin American issues more urgent, I thought it would be okay to major in Spanish literature as opposed to English literature, philosophy, or history, which were the popular majors. I thought, “Why not do Spanish Literature?” I already had something of an interdisciplinary thing. I was in a program then called “Special Program in European Civilization,” where you majored in one department, but then you would have to take related courses in other departments. These related courses I took were mainly in philosophy. I had a second major in philosophy. That is where I took a course with Richard Rorty, who, just as a junior professor, was not so famous then. But I thought he taught a great course on analytic philosophy. At Princeton, I was mostly focusing on Spanish literature and the Baroque period. For some reason, I got into the Baroque. I had some friends. We got to listen to music together, we took peyote together, we would listen to Bach and stuff like that. All of that is very deep into the Baroque, I would say. We would look at books of painting and stuff like that. I was getting interested in Marxism too, without really knowing very much about it, mainly because of the Cuban Revolution. I started to read some Marxism and to identify myself as a socialist. I belonged to the Princeton Socialist Club.

The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect: Five Critical Conversations has addressed the profession of the foreign humanities in relation to five outstanding figures situated in the immediate setting of the United States of America (”foreign” or non-U.S. horizons, or bigger world/s inside which the superpower is but an hegemonic part, but not the whole world, and both uneven dimensions get tangled up). This immigrant piece of scholarship spanning two decades wants to encourage foreign entanglements against any form of nativism: the more, the better. In so doing I still like the idea of mise en abyme, the “abyssal perspective” or “play within the play.” That is, self-consciouness inside the American circumstances finds itself fighting for signification and recognition. I do so here in relation to the “Latin” American scene, now less benign and less giving, in these hard times of relative U.S. decline or interregnum. Hence, I continue suggesting “staging” in the afterword as I close down bringing the critical attention to our five noted figures, looking at them in the eye so to speak. We are still -and for how long?-- in the “Anglo Zone” on both sides of the Atlantic, and the said rubric refers to the hegemonic Anglophone North Atlantic, no locus amoenus, but embattled timespace in which myriad exchanges and (de-) links take place in the lingua franca, but not exclusively. These conversation pieces have included the names of Walter D. Mignolo, John Beverley, Rolena Adorno, José Rabasa and Roberto González Echevarría in the original chronological order that can be easily upset.There are different localities (Washington, DC, shortly before 9/11, the city of Pittsburgh, Berkeley and Stanford, also New Haven). There are different states: North Carolina, Pennsylvania, California and Connecticut. There are six representative institutions: Duke University, University of Pittsburgh, University of California, Berkeley and Yale University—add Stanford University. The affiliations were Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, Hispanic Studies and Romance Studies and there are new rubrics now in some quarters (Latin American and Iberian among different versions of comparative literature and culture). Other disciplines such as anthropology, philosophy, history, sociology, art are brought forward. International relations and foreign affairs are always implied and I still feel that these ‘externalities’ should be made more explicit. I will continue pursuing these associations between for-eign humanities and foreign affairs in the near future.