From There to Here Archives

From There to Here: Matthew Butler

Map of West Germany (in blue), where Dr. Butler was born (via Wikipedia)

I can’t claim to have a particularly fascinating or intrepid migrant story, just a slightly convoluted one: I came to the US from the UK in 2008, though I had not lived in “my” part of the UK, England, for five years before that because when I moved here, it was from Belfast in Northern Ireland. Even the “my” feels a bit elective, since I wasn’t born in England but in West Germany as the child of a British services family, and have spent a lot of time living in and studying Mexico. All of this is to say that people can have multiple and cumulative senses of belonging and that borders are often arbitrary things––just as that archaic-sounding phrase, “West Germany,” tells us. I came to Austin to work, then, pure and simple, but expecting that home would soon be where the heart is. Sometimes, actually, I think Texas claimed me long ago because I have always been fascinated by vaquero-culture; I still like the fact that a bus ride to UT down I-35 rolls along the Chisolm Trail. Really I came to Austin because UT has a brilliant Latin American History program with an incredible library and archive, the Benson Collection, largely focused on Mexico. And sunshine, which hasn’t been invented in England yet. I’ve stayed in Texas because I like it (mostly), because my son was born here, and because my students are always teaching me new things. Mexico is also our neighbor: for me it’s a privilege to work in a University that has such historic and actual ties with the country I study, and so many Mexican and latino students.

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From There to Here: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Map of Ecuador (via Wikimedia)

I arrived in the Unites States 30 years ago, penniless but wide-eyed. I did not come to be a graduate student. I came as a migrant, fleeing war. I was fortunate. I met my first wife in Ecuador and she was a US citizen, I therefore did not come undocumented. Since I had only a smattering of English and everything in this country was wholly unknown to me, it took me months to find a job as a dishwasher. It was not easy: I had been trained as a medical doctor. I originally applied to a degree in Neurophysiology but Tufts turned me down. Then, one day, I serendipitously found in Madison courses on Kepler, Galileo and Copernicus. I immediately applied to the History of Science and got in without funding. I waited a year to establish residency. In the meantime, I learned to speak and write in English. I kept on working as a minimum wage, fast-food cook for five years while taking seminars and doing research. Graduate school was a mixture of homesickness, material hardship, and intellectual feasting. I loved every minute.

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From There to Here: Indrani Chatterjee

Map of India (via State Department)

By Indrani Chatterjee

In 1947, when British India was carved into two states of India and Pakistan, many Hindu families relocated from eastern Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in 1971) to Indian Bengal. My parents came from two such families. My father was deeply curious about the world, and bought various Readers Digest and National Geographic publications on a meager rupee-based salary, earned as a doctor in the postcolonial Indian army. My youth was shaped by his predicament, balancing between his own ‘outsider’ status in the complex social-political world of postcolonial India, and the straining to flee these complexities for a world conjured up by books, theater, film.

In the 1980s, when I wanted to pursue research in history, funds were scarce. I worked as an adjunct at various women’s colleges for some years, learning to teach neo-literate young girls about distant places and long-ago events in Hindi when necessary. I met my partner, another historian, at a teacher’s strike for better wages during one such stint. Five years later, a scholarship to pursue research in School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, finally gave me the chance to belong to the land of books my parents had taught me to love.

The wealth of records in the SOAS Library, British Library and the British Museum convinced me to remain in the field of teaching and research, and to make these gains available to others in the country of my origin. But the country of my birth-origin had moved on by the late 1990s. Though I resigned my tenured job of teaching in a college of Delhi University, and moved to a full-time research position in my mother’s beloved city, Calcutta, the ethnic-linguistic and religious sectarianisms of the closing years of the millennium also narrowed research agendas. The Indian elections of 1998 were decisive in that regard. My life in research, as distinct from my partner’s, was over if we did not relocate. By 2000, we had both begun another version of ‘outsider’ lives, this time in the North American academe, he as a chair-holding professor, and me as a spouse on a visa that disallowed paid employment! Then began the struggle to secure work-authorization and the green card (resident status), learning the rituals of professional belonging – the job-search, from letter-writing to securing letter-writers for one’s own research, the social codes undergirding the profession. Mercifully, there were the Journal of Higher Education, various web-sites for applicants, and more than a little help from my friends. With all these tools, a brave Black feminist Chair heading a search at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ and an inheritance of survivorship, I entered the academic workforce in 2001. And here I am, a citizen, learning my way through the delightful open stacks of the Perry Castañeda Library, willing to do whatever it takes to preserve this new country of mine for the perpetually curious.

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From There to Here: Lina de Castillo

By Lina de Castillo

Map of Columbia (via Wikipedia)

In September of 1980, my mother took a calculated risk. As a talented singer with perfect pitch frustrated by a broken marriage and limiting law career, my mom left Bogotá, Colombia to pursue her dream of opera singing. My father, already starting his second family, agreed that my brother and I needed to go with her. My maternal grandparents followed us to the United States soon thereafter. While my mother worked hard to win first prize at international lyric-opera competitions with the help of a renowned voice coach, my brother and I worked hard to learn English and excel in school with the help of caring teachers, our grandparents, and kind friends. We both were inspired by our mother’s tremendous efforts and her willingness to take risks. Although my daily life during the school year took place in Westchester County, New York, an important part of my childhood also took place in Bogotá, where I spent many summers and occasional winter breaks with my Colombian family. I yearned to learn more about the place of my birth. I also missed my family terribly when I wasn’t with them. At the same time, I appreciated the security, opportunities, and friendships I found in the United States.

Curiously, although Latin America was often included in the content of our social studies textbooks, we rarely got the chance to actually study the region. As an undergraduate student at Cornell University, I finally found courses that began to teach me about Latin America, including a course on US-Latino literature (the gendered sensitivity evoked by “Latinx” had yet to be imagined). For the spring semester of my junior year, I decided to ‘study abroad’ at home in Colombia. Doing so proved to be one of the most eye-opening and academically satisfying experiences of my life up to that point. The international relations seminar I took with Juan Gabriel Tokatlian at la Universidad de los Andes helped me see more clearly the problems that come with treating a public health crisis (drug addiction) through militarization and strategies of war. At the Javeriana University, I signed up for a graduate-level seminar on the Annales school, a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century that stresses long-term social history. A fellow student openly revealed his Marxist leanings and offered memorable critiques of our readings. These conversations for the first time allowed me to realize that there could be different schools of thought when it came time to develop historical analyses. Upon graduation, I decided to return to Colombia, where I taught a version of the US-Latino literature course at the university level, but only until my supervisor required that I teach the 19th-Century Colombian History survey. These experiences, together with the friendships I made with colleagues at la Javeriana and los Andes made one thing clear: if I wanted to be serious about teaching and researching at the university level, I needed to pursue graduate study in the United States. At the end of the day, the only career track that would allow me to bi-locate between my two beloved homes, the United States and Colombia, was the historical profession.

Also in this series:

Tatjana Lichtenstein
Julie Hardwick
Toyin Falola
Yoac Di-Capua
Susan Deans-Smith

From There to Here: Julie Hardwick

by Julie Hardwick

Map of the United Kingdoms (via Wikipedia)

(UT History faculty come from all over the world. Here are their stories.)

I came here, aged 21, on 15 August 1984 to join a study abroad program in Wisconsin with every intention of returning to the UK to become an accountant in London – and in fact I had a nice job waiting. Instead I met my now husband of 31 years two days later, and I have been here ever since: first on a student visa as I shifted into a PhD program at Johns Hopkins, then on a green card as the spouse of a citizen, and latterly as a United States citizen. We have two native Texan daughters who have dual citizenship and they are very proud of their American and British roots.

From There to Here: Tatjana Lichtenstein

(UT History faculty come from all over the world. Here are their stories.)

By Tatjana Lichtenstein

Map of Denmark (via Wikimedia)

Being an immigrant has always been part of my story. More than 50 years ago, my parents left their home country in search of a better life. They ended up in the small country of Denmark in northern Europe. And it’s small: if you take a map and draw a line connecting Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio – well, Denmark fits within that triangle – and its population is less than those three cities combined. Like many European countries, Denmark did not have a tradition for welcoming immigrants. It was not part of the country’s DNA. My strange name, my parents’ accent, and our different foods made me stand out. I was a foreigner despite having been born there. Even though we were citizens, my family didn’t quite belong; didn’t really feel at home.

Perhaps because I had this feeling of being different, I developed a fascination with history very early in my life. Much like you and I have personal histories – experiences that we can point to as having shaped us – communities and societies also have stories that define them. To me the past is the key to understanding who we are as individuals and as community members. By the time I graduated from high school, I had decided that I wanted to become a professional historian, a teacher and researcher. After finishing my undergraduate degree in Denmark, I spent two years at Brandeis University near Boston, before I went to the University of Toronto for my doctorate in History.

Over nine years ago, I started my job as a professor teaching history at the University of Texas at Austin. My specialization is war and violence in the twentieth century, specifically the Second World War. It is a great privilege to be a teacher and a mentor to my students. This past January, I became an American citizen and am proud to take on the responsibilities that follows with that privilege.

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