‘LL: How would you describe your book?
Padilla Peralta: My book is a coming of age story, about my experiences as an undocumented immigrant from the time of my family’s arrival in the U.S. to my college career as an undocumented student.
‘LL: A lot of your book deals with your personal experience navigating not just academic worlds, but also reality of modern urban life. People say there’s an invisible war on Latino men and men of color in general. How true is that?
Padilla Peralta: The war is real and the war is waged relentlessly against black and Latino men. One of the major insights of [Michele Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow”] is that each generation in American culture and American society has seen the evolution and refinement of tools for maintaining oppression. So when we talk about this war, one of the things that we need to be aware of is the intersections of how institutions produce this sophisticated set of mechanisms for maintaining systems of oppression.
‘LL: What do you see as some of the challenges facing Latinos–especially males-in college (if you can even find them)?
Padilla Peralta: One of the challenges is their relative absence and the difficulty of finding them, as you mention. One of the things colleges across the board need to do is devote more resources to increasing access to Latino males and other underrepresented groups. But, once they get on campus, there are challenges in finding people who look like them and who can model for them what it is to go through these spaces. So it’s important to provide mentorship in these places, but it has to take several forms. It’s not only a question of having administrators and support staff who are well-trained to offer that mentorship. We also need to diversify the professoriate and the higher levels of administration too. This is a commitment that has to be embraced by post-secondary institutions.
‘LL: What is it like navigating that system as a younger professor?
Padilla Peralta: The way I move through this space has changed because other people perceive me as an authority figure. But there are ways that my experiences are not all that dissimilar than what I experienced as a student. At faculty gatherings the level of diversity is lacking. This is particularly true in my field. In these spaces, I find myself speaking about how the nature and engagement of diverse bodies can be increased. On some level, as academics and classicists, [we] have to commit to doing something substantive about that.
