Felipe Hinojosa
Illuminate’s Baylor in Latin America initiative shapes research, outreach and service to neighbors close to home and throughout Latin America. Last summer, Felipe Hinojosa joined the Baylor faculty as the John and Nancy Jackson Endowed Chair in Latin America and Professor of History. In this Baylor Connections, Hinojosa shares stories of formative experiences that shaped his path to higher education, the vision that drew him to Baylor from Texas A&M, and his hopes for collaborative work throughout the institution to advance the Baylor in Latin America initiative.
Derek Smith:
Hello and welcome to Baylor Connections, a conversation series with the people shaping our future. Each week we go in depth with Baylor Leaders, professors, and more discussing important topics in higher education, research, and student life. I'm Derek Smith, and today we are talking with a new member of the Baylor faculty, as of the 2023/24 year, Dr. Felipe Hinojosa. Dr. Hinojosa serves as the John and Nancy Jackson Endowed Chair in Latin America, and Professor of History at Baylor. A historian, author, and higher education leader, Dr. Hinojosa, came to Baylor from Texas A&M, where he served as Professor of History, Assistant Provost for Hispanic Serving Institution Initiatives, and Director for the Carlos H. Cantu Hispanic Education and Opportunity Endowment. At Baylor, he'll provide leadership in the Baylor in Latin America initiative, which will build advancement, research and engagement with countries across Latin America and peer universities across the US. Well, Dr. Hinojosa, we're glad to have you here at Baylor. Glad to have you on the program today. Thanks so much for joining us.
Felipe Hinojosa:
Well, thanks for having me.
Derek Smith:
About your first few months here at Baylor, how have they been? What have you enjoyed? What stood out?
Felipe Hinojosa:
Well, it's been such an incredible time, just getting to know my brilliant colleagues, engaging students. There's a good vibe here at Baylor. There's a good energy that I love, and everyone has been so nice and so welcoming. I'm just excited to be here and to join the faculty. It's a good time, I think, to be at Baylor and to be contributing to something that I really believe in terms of doing research in Latin America and on Latinos in the United States. So yeah, I'm happy to be here. It's been such a wonderful experience so far.
Derek Smith:
Well, we're going to talk about your research extensively here, but I'm curious, the teaching side of things, what have you enjoyed about that?
Felipe Hinojosa:
Well, I tell you what, last fall, I taught a graduate seminar in readings in Latino history, and I had grad students from all over the country. That was different from my experience at my previous institution. So, folks from California, from Georgia, from Boston, from Indiana. So, there were people from all over the place, and I think that brings a different kind of perspective and ideas about the experience of Latinos, of people of color, when we talk about US history and its relationship to Latin America. So, it's been wonderful so far. I've loved it.
Derek Smith:
Well, we're glad to have you here, coming here from Texas A&M. Certainly great institution, but definitely a little rival. We're glad to have you, to have pulled you here.
Felipe Hinojosa:
For sure.
Derek Smith:
Well, I mentioned your role, the John and Nancy Jackson Endowed Chair in Latin America, and of course, professor at history. I'm curious, I mean Texas A&M, all joking inside, a fantastic institution. You got a lot of good things going on. So, why this role? What drew you here?
Felipe Hinojosa:
I think there were a number of things that drew me here. I think first of all, the ways in which Baylor, when I began first talking to folks here, the ways in which Baylor was conceptualizing Latin America, and to think about really the Americas and a hemispheric approach to Latin America, to think about not just the region, but also US foreign policy, the ways in which the history of the United States and its engagements with Latin America have really facilitated, made possible, created, uprooted people from Latin America to come to the United States. And so, in order to understand the issue of immigration today, you really have to look at that history. You've got to take a hemispheric approach to it, and that's what really excited me about being at Baylor.
And the other thing, of course, is the obvious. It being a faith institution, being able to engage with folks that are experts and do research in religious studies was something that was really, really attractive to me. I'm engaged in that work myself as a historian, so I was attracted to the possibility of being able to have conversations over coffee and exchange ideas with religious study scholars. Those two things, I think, really drew me here to want to be here at Baylor. And I'll just be totally honest, just a smaller institution. It feels cozy here. It's comfortable, and there's a really good vibe, as I mentioned at the beginning. So, all those things I think really attracted me here.
Derek Smith:
Very exciting. As we visit with Dr. Felipe Hinojosa here on Baylor Connections, and let's get to know you better a little bit, your path to higher education and your research focus. Was a higher ed career something you knew you wanted early on, or when did that develop?
Felipe Hinojosa:
Oh, absolutely not. No, no, I didn't even know what that was about. I didn't grow up knowing anybody with a PhD. I grew up surrounded really by churches. My dad was a pastor. I'm the youngest of seven children. I had grew up with five sisters, very strong, rowdy, rambunctious women in the house that raised me. My dad was an incredible storyteller. So, for me, those combinations of being around a lot of people, of dad being an incredible storyteller, being a pastor, and the church community, I think attracted me to teaching, to being a part of conversations around education and so forth. But listen, I had a dream to be a social studies teacher in high school and a football coach. That was the dream early on. That's what I wanted to do. I still love the game of football. I follow it very, very closely. But that was my world in growing up in South Texas. And that's the kind of the extent to what I thought about. Higher education didn't come until later.
Derek Smith:
Well, as you mentioned growing up, the son of a pastor, and you just think of all the relationships that form from that. Are there ways that you look back and say, okay, those experiences or those people that were part of our community kind of pushed you towards the focuses that are important to you now? Maybe you didn't see yourself going in higher education, but now that you're in it, the things that are important to you, how much were they shaped by those experiences?
Felipe Hinojosa:
Oh, absolutely. I grew up in Brownsville, Texas, so the southernmost tip of Texas. I grew up a 10-minute walk from the border to Matamoros. You could literally walk to get taquitos in Matamoros as we used to do growing up in Brownsville. But it's only been in looking back where I think about the church community that I was raised in, a predominantly American congregation, working class. It was in [foreign language 00:07:17]. We had an incredible gymnasium that was made of cinder blocks and a tile floor that we played basketball. We all had these Michael Jordan dreams in the '90s, and that's what we did. Played a lot of basketball with neighborhood kids and so forth, and it was a church that was very committed to its community and serving its surrounding community.
There were a lot of programs that we had, and we were an evangelical. We were a Protestant and a Baptist Mennonite church, not Catholic. And so, growing up in that particular context, I think really has pushed me to try to answer these questions of what it means to be Latino in the United States, to be non-Catholic, to grow up in a more Protestant and a Baptist world like I did. And those have been the questions that have fueled my own research and what I do in higher education and how I teach my classes frankly.
Derek Smith:
You described some of those questions that you seek to answer. Where are some of the places that those pursuits take you, certainly from an academic standpoint? But I know it's not strictly academic when you're meeting with people or learning about their lives.
Felipe Hinojosa:
It's taken me everywhere. Dad being a pastor, we grew up going to a lot of church conferences in the Midwest, so places like Kansas and Indiana and Illinois and Iowa became very familiar spaces to me, and so those are the places that I was drawn to with my first book when I was writing about Latinos in the Mennonite Church and their civil rights activism and so forth. I think the second half of that was that cities have always been an important place of congregation. We had family in Houston growing up. We used to go to Houston all the time, and cities just fascinated me. And it's taken me, I think, to exploring the place of Latinos in neighborhoods of these larger American cities, because those are the places where us as a community, we're trying to figure out what our place is in American society and looking at the place of cities, I think really highlights that and gets us moving in that direction.
I think the other thing that I'll add there too, is that the church that I grew up in was not just committed to its neighborhood and its community. In the 1980s, it got wrapped up, not by its own choosing, but because of the politics in Central America. It got wrapped up in the sanctuary movement and became a place where refugees from Central America came to find a place to get a warm meal, maybe take a shower, and make contact with family in the north. That was a transformative experience for me as a kid. I think I was probably in about seventh or eighth grade at the time, playing basketball and learning to play soccer with people from Central America whose life circumstances I obviously did not understand and didn't understand the politics at that time. But as I look back, I know that that was a really formative moment because it has kept me sort of asking, "What is the role of church in society? What responsibility do we have as people of faith to respond to some of the significant and important questions of our time?"
Derek Smith:
I think you may, as you ask those questions there, may have just answered the question I have, but I'm going to ask you specifically, when you're interacting with your students or interacting with readers who are reading your scholarship or even listeners to the show, what are some of the questions that if people engage with you in your work, you want them to ask? Or what are some of the things, the places you want your students to mentally take themselves if they have a different background?
Felipe Hinojosa:
Yeah. I am a firm believer that Latino history is American history. And in the belief that Latinos have a long history of contributing to the democratic process in the United States, fighting for voting rights, fighting for a place to call home. Those have been very, very significant things to Latinos. When I get into a classroom full of students with diverse backgrounds, for me, it starts with what does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to be an American? What are these questions of citizenship, of democracy, of political involvement and even of personal responsibility that we have to make this country better? And so, for me, it starts there.
It's with these big broad questions of what are our responsibilities and what does it mean to be an American? And as we engage those questions, I take my students through the stories of people of Latin American descent in the United States and the ways in which they have as outsiders to the nation and as people that have taken on themselves a very sort of American identity through generational assimilation or acculturation into the places that they've grown up, speaking Spanglish, mixing English and Spanish and cultural mixes and so forth.
All of those things I want my students to, in a way, rediscover America and see it from a whole different vantage point.
Derek Smith:
This is Baylor Connections. We are visiting with Dr. Felipe Hinojosa, the John and Nancy Jackson Endowed Chair in Latin America, and Professor of History here at Baylor. Let's talk a little more about this Jackson Chair role. You think about, there's been a lot of these chair positions that have grown here at Baylor in recent years through Illuminate and Give Light each with a different area of focus. You painted a picture for us of what attracted you to this role, but obviously, you talk about vision. You had to envision yourself in this role when you were thinking about it and what you could do. What was most compelling to you about the opportunities that a chair position at a place that had the Baylor in Latin America initiative as one of five signature initiatives, what you could accomplish?
Felipe Hinojosa:
Really, I think it was about bringing my faith and my research together. And being able to be at a place where we were going to have those conversations about what it means to be Latino in the United States, what it means to be in a state whose demographics have already changed dramatically and are going to continue to change. By, I think it is 2050 or something, Latinos are going to be something around 53 million in the State of Texas. That's like California and New York combined in terms of thinking about population numbers. Demographics mean something, they matter, but they're not everything, right? They're not destiny.
And so, thinking about that demographic shift and what it means now for Baylor, what Baylor's responsibilities are to the community in terms of student outreach, in terms of student recruitment, in terms of the curriculum that it offers, all of those things were really central. And add to that a sense of combining or using our research and the work that we do, not just myself, but other people here at Baylor, to answer some of the most pressing questions of poverty, of access to healthcare, housing rights, and of course, immigration.
It's at the forefront of a lot of these political discussions, and oftentimes, politicians leave out people's humanities. We see, or at least the picture that's painted is one of a threat or criminality, and we forget the humanity in all of that, and I think there's really, really good room and possibility for Baylor to, from a position of faith and from an institution that cares very deeply about excellence in research, to try to say, "How can we humanize this process, and how can we use our research to really address some of these more pressing questions?"
Derek Smith:
What does it mean to you? You mentioned you have this chair role, but it's not just you, it's everyone joining. What does it mean to you to try to galvanize, you've got a lot of great colleagues, as you said here on campus, to try to work with them and partner and find ways to work on this together?
Felipe Hinojosa:
I come from a big family, and I come from a church that's always worked at building community, and that's what I believe. That's what I want to bring to Baylor to try to work with folks that are specialists in Latin America and in Latinos in the US, or specialists in race and ethnicity and folks that cover a broad variety of topics. That's what I firmly believe in. We tend to think about research as an isolating process, as sort of a singular process where, as a scholar, as a historian especially, you go to the archives alone, you go and you write the book or the article or whatever it is, and I think we forget that the work that we do is, or at least I believe it should be very communal. It should be something where we bring in folks to not just serve as peer reviewers, but really to sort of help us think about things in different ways and gain access to information that we otherwise would not have had.
I certainly see myself as an expert in Latino history in the United States, but not somebody that knows everything. I need my community. I need people around me to help me see a clearer path, and that's the sense that I get. This is the vibe that I spoke about earlier where I get here where folks are like, "Let's collaborate. Let's do something together. Let's talk about what it means to teach US history from a global perspective or to think about the place of the United States in global politics." That's exciting to me. I don't just want to be locked up in some room doing this work on my own. I know that's part of it. That's what we do as scholars and so forth, but I love that community part, and I love learning from folks that are certainly a lot smarter than I am. So, that's the fun part.
Derek Smith:
And it's smarter to get everyone smarter together too, right [inaudible 00:17:24]?
Felipe Hinojosa:
That's right. Absolutely. Right. And let's have a good time. Let's have some food. Let's get some music. Let's exchange ideas. That's beautiful.
Derek Smith:
Absolutely. Well, Dr. Hinojosa, you think about The Baylor in Latin America initiative and alongside others like data sciences. I mean, there's so multifaceted. You kind of know, "Okay, you're going to have some statistical scientists, some computer scientists, mathematicians." There's definitely some foundational pieces in each of these, health, certainly ties together.
Felipe Hinojosa:
Sure.
Derek Smith:
Baylor in Latin America can touch on seemingly an infinite number of areas when you think about that as an initiative. So, for you, where do you begin? Obviously, just getting to know your colleagues and your students has been a part of that, but what have been some ways that you've been able to take this huge process and start out in some bite-sized ways?
Felipe Hinojosa:
I mean, it starts with the relationships, and it really starts in understanding that we need people that are in disciplines that seem to be very distant from ours in the humanities, but to think about working with social scientists or to think about working with scientists that are focused on the environment, water rights, to look at people that are legal scholars and to bring in folks from different perspectives. The border region, which this Latin America initiative, the Texas Mexico border is a major focus of this, encompasses all of those things, land rights, access to healthcare, people that have an understanding for educational rights and access to education for folks on the Texas Mexico border. And cross border relationships between families and culture and music and all of these sorts of things. There's no way that we can do this without taking an interdisciplinary approach. We have to open up these possibilities and engage with scholars in different fields, and I'm very, very interested and very invested in that.
Some of the research that I've done in the past has combined legal scholars from the Texas A&M Law School in Fort Worth, where we've looked at the legal needs in the Rio Grande Valley and the lack of really access to lawyers just at a very sort of basic level for folks to figure out legal rights, wills, land rights, all of these sorts of things that are major, major questions for families. To do that here at Baylor, I think really opens us up to some great possibilities to say, "Let's move out of our silos. Let's get out of... " As great as the Tidwell building is in history and religious studies and sociology and so forth, but to think about, "Okay, where are the folks that are doing this work in different fields and from different perspectives, and how can we work collaboratively?"
Derek Smith:
Well, Dr. Hinojosa, as we wind down on the program, you've painted this picture, but I want to ask you again in close because it seems to encompass so much of what is a part of your research, whether it was when you were a child at your church or even now, that idea of serving your neighbors with your neighbors. How much does that drive what's coming ahead as we close?
Felipe Hinojosa:
It's first and foremost, I love also that that's first and foremost for Baylor. This is about research. This is about service. This is about taking what we do and not keeping it locked up, not putting it on some shelf for it to collect dust. We want to do research that is going to address some of the major questions of our time. And we are committed to that. I know Baylor's committed to that. I'm certainly committed to that.
And it starts with relationships, and it starts with taking the work that we do very seriously, using all of our skills, whether it's the language skills we have, whether we have an understanding of cultures, a scientific view, a legal view, all of those things, bringing them together and saying, "What are the major problems that we can address and help? How can we collaborate with communities, not come in as these external researchers and say, 'Here are our solutions to the problems,' but how can we work together with communities to try to say, 'Here are the questions that we have. These are the responses. What are people thinking and how are people working in this way?'"
I think that's for me, first and foremost, and it takes me back really to where it all started for me at church and to have a community that said, "We cannot worship God here. We cannot just do our prayers and sing our fast rhythmic hymns, all of that stuff. We can't just do that here without engaging our neighbor and without opening the doors of the church to everyone." And I see that, and I take that with me wherever I go.
Derek Smith:
Well, that's wonderful. Well, thank you for sharing with us today. Excited to see the work that's ahead and hope it's really a great first year for you as you build here at Baylor.
Felipe Hinojosa:
Thank you so much.
Derek Smith:
Dr. Felipe Hinojosa, the John and Nancy Jackson Endowed Chair in Latin American, Professor of History at Baylor, our guest today on Baylor Connections. I'm Derek Smith reminding you can hear this and other programs online, connections.baylor.edu. You can subscribe to the program on iTunes. Thanks for joining us here on Baylor Connections.