New Mexico State University alumnus Jorge Hernandez is a man of the border, with sensibilities that evolved from being born in the U.S. and raised in Mexico, but acculturated in Vado, New Mexico, a town of about 3,000 residents nestled between Las Cruces and El Paso.
Hernandez earned both his bachelor’s in foreign languages and history and his master’s in Spanish at NMSU. Now he is completing a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico. His dissertation, however, is steeped in the borderlands and the formation and displacement of Mexican American communities. Its title: “Corazones Urbanos: Literary Cartographies and Southwest Cities in the Mexican American Spatial Imaginary.”
“We come to know place and space through story,” Hernandez said. “So for scholars doing this kind of work, we have to tell the stories of the community, we have to know the people. The people matter, so do their stories. We must honor them as best as we can through our work.”
While scholarship about Mexican American and Latino communities is often focused on major urban spaces like New York and Los Angeles, Hernandez is focused on how urban development, renewal, and gentrification have come to be represented by regional Mexican American and Latino communities in the Southwest.
“My work shifts that conversation because I’m not from Los Angeles, I’m from Vado, New Mexico. However, there’s a broader discussion to be had about how these communities have experienced spatial and discursive displacement, as well as how they have responded to such through their community activism and cultural production,” Hernandez said.
“I grew up in the Las Cruces-Juarez-El Paso border plex," Hernandez said. "So, the question is: How do we have a conversation about similar yet inherently different regional Mexican American urban spaces? My work specifically looks at Tucson, San Antonio, and Albuquerque through the panorama of the 20th century and various writers, from men, to women, and LGBTQ plus writers in these very different communities.”
Hernandez approaches the discourse about urban Mexican American communities in two ways: one from the perspective of traditions in established communities that are hundreds of years old; and a second conversation from the communities, the way they see themselves.
Hernandez’s work examines Tucson through the perspectives of historians, writers, and intellectuals, highlighting how they interpret the downtown community during the 1940s, from the 1970s through the 1980s, and from the present looking into the past.
In San Antonio, Hernandez begins his examination from the early 1900s and the actions of the “Angel of the Alamo” Adina de Zavala, who saved the iconic structure from demolition. Decades later, “inaugural City Poet Laureate of San Antonio (2012-2014) and Texas State poet laureate (2015), Carmen Tafolla, who began her poetic oeuvre during the Chicano movement in the 1970s and has continued to this day writing about the importance of place, space, community, and San Antonio’s Indigenous, Mexican American, and Latino cultures,” Hernandez said. “Then we have renowned writers having conversations about San Antonio in the 1990s, like Sandra Cisneros in her collection: ‘Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.’”
Hernandez starts looking at Albuquerque’s story in the 1940s from a cultural perspective during its nuclear phase. “Albuquerque, methodologically, presents a very different scenario,” Hernandez said. “Unlike Tucson and San Antonio, which each have intellectuals, writers, and community activists, – featured in manuscript-length works published in major regional presses, writing about their respective urban spaces – Albuquerque is just a little bit different. Indeed, the University of New Mexico hosts numerous master’s theses and doctoral dissertations focused on Albuquerque’s local communities.”
Albuquerque, where he lives now, is revealed in layers according to Hernandez. “The foundation of Albuquerque is an Indigenous space, and scholars have kind of written about this. There’s a very wonderful book called “Indigenous Albuquerque” by UNM scholar Myla Vicenti Carpio.
In the 1960s, Albuquerque’s next layer is what Hernandez calls “a Chicano urban space,” alongside a subsequent layer, the “Anglo American concept of how the city is built and how it should be structured.”
Renowned Chicano writer and icon Rudolfo Anaya offers a critique of this and other topics in his novels, “Heart of Aztlán” (1976) and “Alburquerque” (1992), which uses the original Spanish spelling of the city’s name.
“I leave Albuquerque towards the end because I think that if we are to look at the future of urbanism in the Southwest, I think we really have to take a good look at Albuquerque,” Hernandez said. “Although they’re all Mexican American communities, established for more than a hundred years, every single community presents a different case study. Every community presents a different and very clear local and regional expression of how very different urban renewal initiatives play out in these spaces.”
Hernandez journey as regional scholar, focused on the Southwest, began in Vado, New Mexico. His next research topic will bring him back home to the Las Cruces, El Paso, Juarez region, which he sees merging into one big city with complex geographical identities.
“I grew up literally between these three cities,” Hernandez said. “Each city has their own individual identities that contribute to a consensus of the larger regional identity. It is my responsibility as an academic not only to participate in academic discourse regarding them, but also to serve as a bridge between communities.”
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CUTLINE: Alumnus Jorge Hernandez earned both his bachelor’s in foreign languages and history and his master’s in Spanish at New Mexico State University. He is completing a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico. Hernandez research is focused on how urban development, renewal and gentrification have come to be represented by Mexican American and Latino communities in the Southwest. (Courtesy photo)