Ep. 35 – Slow Theory, is this the way?: Star Wars, Storytelling, & Latino Dads

[00:00:00] Intro: You’re listening to LatinXperts, a podcast of Latino Studies at the University of Texas at Austin LatinXperts features the voices of faculty, staff, and students, as well as friends and alumni of the Department of Mexican-American and Latino. Latino studies, the Latino Research Institute and the Center.

[00:00:30] Intro: American Studies. Join us for this episode of LatinXperts.

[00:00:43] Rachel: Welcome back. We are on UT campus. This is fantastic. This is LatinXperts. I’m your host for today, Dr. Rachel Gonzalez- Martin, and I’m very excited because my guest today, who I will refer to by many names, I’m sure during the course of this interview, is Dr. Domino Perez, full professor of English here at the University of Texas.

[00:01:05] Rachel: We’re celebrating, always all month, all year. We are here. Well, Let’s just say, dunno, how you doing? How’s it going?

[00:01:13] Domino: I’m okay. It’s just getting used to hearing the full professor and then my name following them.

[00:01:20] Domino: That’s right. I

[00:01:21] Rachel: hope you get new cards. Like faculty cards. I kept telling myself after tenure I would get new ones and I still haven’t, but I just tell people like no, I’m tenure.

[00:01:29] Rachel: Don’t look at the old cards. Those are gone. Those are, that’s the past. I feel like the full professor ones should be like very like Victorian, elaborate, nice. Like a little gold edging. I think as a full professor, that’s something you should consider fighting for these days.

[00:01:43] Domino: I appreciate that.

[00:01:44] Domino: But I think you also realize it until I actually see it in print. Like I have the paper confirmation uhhuh, it’s still in the realm of the theoretical.

[00:01:53] Rachel: Such a professor, always a professor, a lifetime, a professoring. But I totally agree. It’s all up in the air until it’s official.

[00:02:02] Rachel: Today, luckily enough, something that is absolutely real and in the world, is your new book. Yes. Called “Fatherhood in the Borderlands: A Daughter’s Slow Approach”. And it came out just at the end of last year, December, the University of Texas Press. So big congratulations. Thank you. I’ve always been a fan girl of your first book, “There Was a Woman.”

[00:02:22] Rachel: Which was a cultural studies literary popular culture menagerie. Really following the life of the legend of Llorona. Internationally transnationally, right in these different creative venues. And as an undergraduate, I didn’t have any resource like that. There was really no book in the area of folklore.

[00:02:44] Rachel: And I’m a folklorist for those who haven’t heard these podcasts before. I’m a folklorist, so I’m always trolling for things to replicate scholars that have been working. And it wasn’t until I found your book, and as you’ve heard the story, many a times when I was asked to review your book when I was in graduate school, that I was like, oh my God, I could have gone to Texas to study and not, still not having a good sense of the divide between ethnographic work and literary criticism and pop culture studies.

[00:03:10] Rachel: But that first book really brought it together and it really changed what I thought I could with . My graduate degree, with my research. Now it’s being recorded that I’m just giving you that credit that I love it. And then you hired me a few years how many years later,

[00:03:25] Domino: Without knowing that review existed in the world.

[00:03:27] Rachel: Yes. But it did, and this is what’s good. We’re connecting the, we’re connecting all the dots.

[00:03:32] Domino: I do have to say that I think I’m gonna steal the word menagerie.

[00:03:36] Rachel: Fantastic.

[00:03:37] Domino: As an organizational idea.

[00:03:39] Rachel: That’s something I think we’re gonna get to.

[00:03:40] Domino: I like it better than in some ways archive. Archive connotes certain values, certain ideas, but menagerie, I like the chaotic quality of it.

[00:03:50] Rachel: To me, when I think of menageries and I’m thinking about, this is terrible and I’m not, I wasn’t a good student of English, but it was that play, it was a “Glass of Menagerie.” I forget who wrote,

[00:04:00] Domino: You are correct. Yes.

[00:04:01] Rachel: Thinking about the idea of a pretty cabinet where we amass all these things that there are, there’s little figurines, right? But that they’re beautiful to us

[00:04:10] Domino: and they’re organized in a way that makes sense to us.

[00:04:12] Rachel: To us. Exactly. And that’s, to me, that’s a big thing.

[00:04:14] Domino: That’s my book. So thank you. This has been really helpful. Have a good afternoon.

[00:04:18] Rachel: No, but now we have to give the people some more meat in terms of this book.

[00:04:21] Rachel: So one, in all seriousness, right? I wouldn’t have tenure without you. I’m an associate professor of Latino Studies here at UT and so I’m super excited to be able to see my friend and colleague and mentor on this other side, this other book, which I feel weirdly happy that like I’ve been around to see Purdue.

[00:04:39] Rachel: Cuz let’s be honest, I got to La Llorona after the fact. I was a footnote be like, but this, I was like, this. I can, we can talk about from its very inception. Start us off, like what made you wanna talk about Brown Fathers?

[00:04:53] Domino: Yeah. That’s the question that I get most often, and it has to do, it has everything to do with.

[00:05:01] Domino: My own father and not seeing men like my father or the men in my family being represented anywhere. Not in film, not in literature, not television, not pop culture. I think in the popular culture, imaginary there is, or there are, Very specific ways to be brown fathers. You’re either absent or you’re angry, or you do physical labor, manual labor.

[00:05:36] Domino: The house looks a certain way. The person rules the house in a certain way, and certainly there are families that do have some correlation to some of those representations. And so I’m in no way eager to erase that experience. But what I’m trying, what I wanted to do was I wanted to broaden the representational experience.

[00:06:01] Domino: And my father was a ex-military. He was in the Marines.

[00:06:07] Rachel: I feel like that tells US worlds about just in general, a culture of your household that would’ve been different from other folks.

[00:06:12] Domino: Oh gosh, yes. We were like a little platoon. That’s how things function. That is how things function. There was a right way to do things and there was an incorrect way to do things.

[00:06:22] Rachel: It’s funny how those can overlay on Dad’s way of doing things and everyone else’s.

[00:06:26] Domino: But I will say this, there was an incorrect way of doing it, and if you were doing it incorrectly, it was also a time to intervene and teach the right way. Oh, okay. To do things. So it wasn’t just, you’re not doing this correctly.

[00:06:38] Domino: Here’s some sort of punishment or whatever the case may be. It’s, no, you’re doing this incorrectly. This is the correct way to do it.

[00:06:45] Rachel: Pause for a second and we’ll come back to this, but give us a little bit about your background. Cuz I don’t feel impertinent in asking this because your book is actually quite personal as much as it is an academic text for teaching at the undergraduate graduate level, right?

[00:06:58] Rachel: You could, any sort of thoughtful scholar of media studies, cultural studies, popular culture could use your text, but. Talk to us a little bit about growing up.

[00:07:07] Domino: Yeah, so I’m originally from Houston, Texas. My brother and I initially grew up in what we would’ve called a barrio, but I don’t think our neighbors would’ve called it.

[00:07:17] Domino: We grew up in a little barrio called Cottage Grove, which was a multiethnic community. And it was a multi ethnic community that sprung up around, steel mill and railroad and it was called Cottage Grove because the houses were the cottages where the laborers were ensconced

[00:07:37] Domino: And around those cottages, additional houses sprung up. But it was a really multiethnic neighborhood in the sense that we had, Polish families, Czech families, Chinese families, Mexican American families. Interestingly, we did not have black families. Interesting. But I grew up in this multiethnic environment, and I just thought that’s the way that things were.

[00:08:00] Domino: Like you had, porogis across the street. Sure. And you have, everybody’s, everybody’s belief systems were co-mingling. Absolutely. And I just thought that’s the way that the world was. And it wasn’t until we moved out of Cottage Grove into the suburbs of Houston that I really began to feel that sense of isolation because when we lived in Cottage Grove, my grandparents, both sets of grandparents lived there.

[00:08:26] Domino: Oh, wow. My great aunt lived down the street. Another Tía lived a couple of houses over. You couldn’t throw a stone in that neighborhood and not hit somebody’s house to whom I was related. Yeah. And so there were constantly people coming and going and, go down at the, go down to your Tia’s house and get this, come back, and we ran around at a really young age, really unsupervised, because everybody was looking out for everybody else. Sure.

[00:08:51] Domino: It was a very, tight-knit community, even in its conflicts. This is our business. You can stay out of it.

[00:08:59] Domino: In the neighborhood. neighborhood business. Right, right. And there was a what was fondly and derisively identified or called a beer joint where all the men would go after work. Sure. Go down and get your Tío from the beer joint, children walking

[00:09:15] Domino: now, not, I’m not quite so popular now, but at a time.

[00:09:18] Domino: No, it was, you’re known. Oh yeah, you’re blah blah blahs.

[00:09:21] Domino: But I bring the, yeah, but I bring that up because even within that community there were designated spaces of gender and they were designated places of ethnicity and culture, and yet it was still one.

[00:09:35] Rachel: Absolutely.

[00:09:36] Rachel: So thinking about these experiences, and watching things change, you said as you’ve moved from area to area, and it sounds like moving from Cottage Grove to the suburbs of Houston was also less family around it was just a different dynamic.

[00:09:48] Rachel: Where was your interest? Your text your book talks a lot about, representations, tv, film, right?

[00:09:54] Domino: Yeah. So to afford that middle class life, and we were very much middle class. My father was an engineer. My mother was a bank teller. Although she

[00:10:06] Rachel: a very invisible narrative, right?

[00:10:08] Rachel: The middle class Mexican.

[00:10:09] Domino: Absolutely. But, this is a, my mother had a high school education. My father had a high school education, but this was also back in the time when you could apprentice. And so he started off as an apprentice to, a an electrician. So really learning how things work.

[00:10:29] Domino: Absolutely. Learning schematics and things wiring from the ground up, like physically doing it and then conceptualizing it in his mind. And then he apprentice as an electrical engineer and then became one in his own right. And then became, an engineer in charge of offshore drilling technologies.

[00:10:50] Rachel: Oh wow. Yeah.

[00:10:51] Domino: So all without a degree. It’s a very different way of doing things. Absolutely. But to move to the suburbs of Houston to be where we were meant both parents had to work. Absolutely. Yeah. So my brother and I, in the absence of family close by, had to take care of ourselves. And and I say that without there’s, I was five.

[00:11:17] Domino: Today, Child’s protective services would be called. And it’s a different cultural moment, but I was a latchkey kid, but not tragically so

[00:11:26] Rachel: for our audience who might be fairly young as undergraduates, what is a latchkey kid?

[00:11:30] Domino: A latchkey kid? We’re, we were an army, as I described them in the book.

[00:11:35] Domino: We were an army of children who every day would take ourselves to school, get up, fix our breakfast, get our stuff together, take ourselves to school, and repeat the process and lock ourselves in our houses until our parents, guardians, whomever, came home. Sometimes that was that evening. Sometimes it was a couple of days.

[00:11:59] Domino: But the idea. But the idea is that we were all. Carrying around keys sewn into hidden pockets, on sort of grimy yarn necklaces. Whatever that, and we closed the latch. Yeah. We’d open the latch to let ourselves out in the morning and close it when we got home and there we would stay.

[00:12:18] Rachel: So it was a lot of. Early independence a lot as a child slash young adult,

[00:12:23] Domino: A lot of early independence, but not without safety. If I didn’t make the first phone call time which was mom’s gotta call at work at 3:30, my mom would call at 3:30

[00:12:32] Domino: so that was enough time for me to you. Mess about a little bit. Yeah. On the way home. Cause I got out at three, right? And it took probably about 15 minutes to walk from the elementary school. And if I wanted to play a little bit, I be better do it in that 15 minutes, but then I had to be home to make that 3:30 phone call.

[00:12:54] Domino: Sure. Then there was another phone call at four o’clock, and then there was another phone call, usually around four 30, which was instructions on how to cook dinner

[00:13:03] Domino: because she would be coming home soon-ish. But

[00:13:05] Domino: to start things going get every, get everything ready to go. Yeah. Um, and then she didn’t the bank where she worked wasn’t too far away, but she would be home by 5:15 and my father would be home shortly after that and dinner would be on the.

[00:13:17] Rachel: It magically happened because there was a whole a whole absolutely platoon behind you.

[00:13:21] Domino: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, it was a lot of time alone. My brother’s, , older than I am by more than a few years. And so it was me and whatever was on the TV after school. Summers were the same way.

[00:13:39] Domino: Because we had to spend so much time, or I had to spend so much time. My brother was older and he was he was my brother, so he was male. He could go out and he had different freedoms. He absolutely, yes. He had different freedoms. Books and movies, those were my friends.

[00:13:50] Rachel: Favorite book, favorite movie currently. I know that’s a cruel question to ask him. He reads and watches as much as you do. Yeah.

[00:13:57] Domino: I think for me and anyone who reads the book, My book will know that, the Empire Strikes Back, will always have a special place for me.

[00:14:07] Domino: But I think my favorite movie has to be Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Ah, yeah. For the way that it just influenced so many things visually. I can watch that movie over and over again and still see something different about it. Yeah. and that’s not even really getting into or engaging with the narrative of enslaved labor.

[00:14:24] Domino: And doing undesirable work and, looking at the way that, the main corporation in the film, the Tyrell Corporation is housed in what looks like, the Pyramid of the Sun. It’s just, there’s a lot going on. There’s so much going on.

[00:14:39] Rachel: If you haven’t seen that movie, you should definitely check it out. Kids and adults. Yes. But tell us a little bit about how that connects, cuz you know, you have. The films that you love, the Empire Strikes Back. Thinking about these, cultural representations from a certain moment that linger, like how do those make it into the book? What are these fathers that we’re able to read about through your text?

[00:15:00] Rachel: What’s going on that makes them remarkable in the way that you’re using them? Yeah.

[00:15:05] Domino: So my father put on a tie to go to. Every single day. I am estranged from my father, but I can give him his flowers. That’s for sure. That man could tie a double winsor like nobody’s business.

[00:15:19] Domino: That thing was impeccable. But that’s, that’s military training, right? You do things the right way, and you, there’s a way to do it. And you do it correctly. And yes, if you’re gonna bother to do it, if you’re gonna bother to do it, you do it correctly, right? and my uncles were also business owners.

[00:15:35] Domino: They were the owners of what was called Oho Construction or Ortiz. And they were one of the first Mexican American owned construction companies to get a contract from the city of Houston. Wow. And so these were very different experiences than what I was seeing. Nobody in the family was a criminal like we saw on tv.

[00:15:58] Domino: Nobody was a drug dealer. Nobody was a pachuco, which didn’t mean that my mom didn’t hang with them when she was in high school because there’s a whole story about one of her really good friends called, his nickname was killer. That we’ll have to say a for another day, but Sure. Like he was called killer cuz he was a lady killer and he always dressed so well that like for sure he could slay.

[00:16:23] Domino: He could slay. I love it. Yeah. So the creases in his pants were no joke. But even that even that kind of experience was, you couldn’t see that anywhere. And I certainly didn’t see it anywhere and I certainly didn’t see it in the. The books and the movies that I consumed voraciously.

[00:16:41] Domino: Now did I realize that? No, I don’t think because I was, books and film were an immersive and they continued to be an immersive experience for me. Yeah. And it wasn’t until I learned to think critically about them that I start to, that I started to notice those absence and what those absences mean. And.

[00:17:00] Domino: Part of that idea of where are these fathers, what are the fathers that were given outside of these kinds of familiar narratives? And they’re very few. very few and far in between. And so I was interested in looking at, what kind of power they did have socially.

[00:17:18] Domino: Culturally, economically, racially, on a familial level. And of course, no surprise what I found is that the fathers that were represented, the place in which they could exercise the most power was in the family, right? And so I was actively looking for representations of fatherhood that didn’t necessarily fit a kind of certain, mold.

[00:17:42] Domino: And I realized as a result of this process, that in this absence, Or in this very small subset. I was also gonna have to write my father into existence. I was gonna have to fill that hole, which was very difficult. Yes. For me, because as I said, this is someone to, from whom I’m estranged.

[00:18:00] Domino: And you mentioned at the beginning that the book is very personal. It is. And it isn. I didn’t want to, in any way pathologize my relationship with Father. Sure. It was, again, like there are things about him as an individual that. I would never, ever discuss and things that, he and I would never ever see eye to eye on.

[00:18:23] Domino: But there are also things that he gave me that helped to, that helped me to see the world the way that I do. And I have to acknowledge that. So from my father, and my father gave me films and my mother gave me books. Oh, okay. In a way that she could, so there were instances, Every, it was a really special treat, but she would break up the monotony of the summer by taking me to work with her.

[00:18:48] Domino: Sure. By this time she was working in a different bank, but two blocks away from the bank was a library. So she would take me and drop me off at the library and there I would stay until she came and had lunch with me. And then, but I was free to roam the library and the librarians, again, different time.

[00:19:06] Domino: Different

[00:19:07] Rachel: time, different community. Someone who was raised by a public librarian and spent many a summer day just hanging at the library. I understand what you mean,

[00:19:14] Domino: right? But the freedom to just take any book off the shelf. Yep. And just sit. And to this day I still have that habit where I go to the library and there’s a book that I’m looking for, but then I take all the other books, friends that are around it, off absolutely the shelf and there we are on the floor together in the library.

[00:19:35] Rachel: I wanna pause for a second cuz I just wanna say that, this is something I think is really important and I often talk about it with my undergrads, but I think it’s even more powerful because let’s be honest, You’re right. Full professor of English at the University of Texas. So this idea of understanding that you can pull through bits of your life that matter to you and bring them into this space of your work, of this intellectual endeavor and build something with it.

[00:20:02] Rachel: The idea that you would have to leave your experiences growing up in Houston to some other place that is not the university to me, I think that’s really powerful. Yeah.

[00:20:13] Domino: And I think that’s for me the appeal of slow research. So slow research is the frame for the book. It’s a daughter’s slow approach. I’m the one who is approaching slowly, yes, but slow, doesn’t necessarily have to do with temporality or rate of speed.

[00:20:31] Domino: So slow is derived in large part from the slow food movement, which was, and started in Italy and this idea of, where does food come from? How has it grown? Is it sustainable? Is it ethical? Asking questions about what it is that we put in our body and how that affects.

[00:20:53] Domino: And it may seem odd, like how do you connect brown fatherhood and like the slow food movement? There are an a series of critical conversations that have emerged from the slow food movement and so slow parenting. Mm-hmm. What does that mean? Slow education, slow teaching slow theater, slow film, right?

[00:21:18] Domino: There’s all of these. And most recently, the president of the American Historical Association, her presidential address was on slow history. So there’s all of these ideas about slowness and for me, all of the reading that I was doing around slowness, it’s, first of all, it’s still very new.

[00:21:37] Domino: In some ways but it depends on where you look, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But in all the things I was reading about slowness, I read an article on slow theater. Very short article, Lisa Lesinger and I, a friend of mine said, I know you’re working on slow.

[00:21:53] Domino: Check this out. So I was still thinking about what can I do with all of this? And I, to me the frame of the book still hadn’t emerged. Yeah. And that slow theater piece begins and ends with the potentiality of baking bread. And I thought this is just very strange. What does any of this have to do?

[00:22:17] Domino: What does this have to do with theater? It has everything and nothing to do with theater in the sense that she’s talking about making bread as a way of feeding, a group of people that she cares about, and you can make the bread over and over again and every time it’s gonna come out different.

[00:22:35] Domino: But there’s so much potential in that making because you’re bringing people together. It’s about thinking about the process. What did I do? Did I do something differently? Did it rise differently? Did I use a different starter? What, all of these ideas. Absolutely.

[00:22:47] Domino: Yes. But it’s about where did it come from? How is it made? Again, those ideas that are tied to, the slow food movement, but ultimately, Schlesinger has us think about is what do we most need, what do we need that doesn’t exist and how can we make it?

[00:23:06] Rachel: And that’s a really powerful statement, not just as an individual thinking about like living in the world and trying to get through, but from an academic scholarly perspective, right?

[00:23:15] Rachel: As for myself as a woman of color scholar recently, not that recently, but recently tenured, right? Thinking about how to survive in this place, how to do work. That you’re proud of work that you can say is thoughtful and critical and mindful of all manner of community and social, tenants that you’d like to keep in mind.

[00:23:35] Rachel: And then not necessarily feeling like there’s, getting to this idea of pace, right? That there’s always time for that kind of work or that kind of work is always valued. So I wonder if you might. Poke a little bit and let us in on this idea of why isn’t everyone trying to do slow scholarship?

[00:23:51] Domino: Yeah. So for me, it wasn’t just about a, again, all of the different approaches that I read and the different kind of thinking around slowness didn’t quite, it wasn’t quite what I. So if Schlesinger is telling us to think about what we need, and there was some useful things in slow foods and slow methodologies.

[00:24:20] Domino: So I thought, okay, what if I take the central ideas to slow food and I apply them to my scholarship? If I apply them to this question of like, Where does it come from? First idea, where does it come from? It comes from a very personal place. My research and most research doesn’t just manifest, right?

[00:24:43] Domino: Absolutely. It comes from a place, however, in the academy where it comes from is not necessarily as important or important at all as the output. Absolutely. And there’s a complete disconnect between where does it come?

[00:24:58] Rachel: We don’t care where it came from. We wanna know that it’s out in the world and

[00:25:00] Domino: Absolutely.

[00:25:01] Rachel: And people are citing it.

[00:25:02] Domino: Absolutely. That to me became an important tenent. Which is why the personal narrative exists in each of the three sections.

[00:25:10] Rachel: Explain to us how your book is a little bit different in terms of form. Because, one thing that I noticed right away and even when, You and I have been able to speak about, your goals for what the book was gonna be and how it might look is that you have your book divided into these sections that within those sections there’s three factors in each section.

[00:25:27] Rachel: And one of those is a personal narrative. And I’ve never seen that kind of writing except in what people might call like experimental ethnography. Where ethnographers working in the field are bringing in field notes, field narratives, in bet in between spaces, as a way right of sharing author position, but you introduce personal narratives in each of the units that you offer, talk to us about this, like the genre that you’re working in, cuz this doesn’t look like a typical cultural studies literary criticism kind of text.

[00:25:57] Domino: Yeah. So that goes back to the exact question that you asked previously. And you know what I was saying, where does it come from?

[00:26:04] Domino: My father gave me film. My mother gave me books. What I realized in looking at that central, that first question, where does it come from? Where does my work come from? I write primarily about literature. I write primarily about film. Even when I’m writing about folklore, I’m writing to some extent about literature.

[00:26:24] Domino: I’m writing about film. Absolutely. And so where did those things come from and to really dig down and look at the source of that information, I had to turn back and say, okay, how did my parents give me this? The, my mother taking me to the library and telling me, or not telling me, I should say that any books were off limits.

[00:26:44] Domino: Different moment. Yeah, different way. But she never said, don’t go look at these books. Don’t go look at, but she also didn’t say, do it. Yeah,

[00:26:51] Domino: she left it open to your exploration. Absolutely.

[00:26:53] Domino: Curiosity. Absolutely. In other words, no knowledge was forbidden.

[00:26:59] Rachel: That’s a gift.

[00:27:00] Domino: It is a gift. And so don’t talk to me about it.

[00:27:06] Rachel: There’s boundaries,

[00:27:06] Rachel: you can learn and then you can put all that in your head. But please don’t come and talk to me about any of this. Like some of these things I don’t wanna know about. I don’t wanna know what you know. I’m just gonna assume that you’ve had access to them and that And you, but

[00:27:18] Rachel: just to pause, luckily, I mean for all our listeners, I had the privilege of meeting your mother and spending time with her while she was still with us.

[00:27:25] Rachel: She was here quinceanera.

[00:27:26] Rachel: My ethnography buddy. Yeah. Now we’re getting, not talking about personal narratives right into this, but Tati, as she was, lovingly called, right Tati she. That you needed to know. Yeah. She unders it’s like very much forward thinking and maybe your next book is on motherhood, right?

[00:27:42] Rachel: Forward thinking. Yeah. Understanding, like to be, to in be in the world, to be functional, to be competitive. She understood that the, that knowledge had to be at your fingertips and you couldn’t be limited. Yeah. And maybe she’s directly responding to her own experiences of access and 100 lack of access.

[00:27:57] Domino: 100%. Because as the oldest in the second set, Of siblings in her family. She was mother, especially after her own mother died to very young. She was mother to her younger siblings. Yeah. And that, and even when her narrative is incredibly complicated, but even when she went to live with, my grandparents, who are actually my great-grandparents, but again, a story for another, this the other day.

[00:28:26] Rachel: That’s a totally different podcast. People in case you’re wondering.

[00:28:28] Domino: It was still her responsibility to look after them and she did. Sure. And so there were so many things that she wanted and couldn’t have. And so she just wanted me to have choices and

[00:28:39] Domino: she just wanted me to have choices in her mind. Yes, to have choices, you had to have knowledge, you had to have education. So she was a fabulous woman, wasn’t she? She was pretty amazing. She was pretty amazing. But she was also. A mother and she was also a Latina mother and all that comes with that. Sure. So I’m just gonna put that in there.

[00:28:57] Rachel: No, for sure. For sure. Again, another podcast. Another podcast. But let’s swing back to fathers cuz I want us to think, I’d love to understand a little more about this, the personal narrative that you were referencing, this idea of in writing yourself into these,

[00:29:10] Domino: So again, this idea of where does it come?

[00:29:13] Domino: And my mother gave me books and my father gave me film, and when I say my father gave me film again, Same kind of thing with the library, when cable arrived at our doorstep, yes. That was a game changer because otherwise I was just watching whatever was coming on in the Million Dollar movie, which came on after General Hospital at three o’clock.

[00:29:37] Domino: And I would watch schlocky movies and they were fantastic. That was a huge part of my education too, and I’m super grateful for the Sinbad and the stop motion and all of those sorts of Sure. Horrible third tier B mo. But again, not filtering your knowledge. Not filtering my knowledge.

[00:29:54] Domino: And then like cable, like movie channel and show. That was crazy. And just the amount of information coming at me. Um, but it was a way to keep me at the

[00:30:07] Rachel: house. That’s right. We’re going full spoil. Back to Latchkey kid,

[00:30:10] Domino: back to Latch Stacey, right? Absolutely. If I’m gonna be there, at least you. I have something to do.

[00:30:16] Domino: I have something to do. But for me, the game changer was, when Star Wars came out, the first film, huge phenomenon, cultural phenomenon. It’s so bizarre to think that I got to see that. Like at its in at the beginning, like of all where we are now. Original. Absolutely. Right. To think but that’s hugely important.

[00:30:35] Domino: And I hope to that there’s enough time for me to, to at least make this point, but like to go from. The all white world of Star Wars to the Mandalorian. Oh yeah. That where you have this like amazing brown father. But again, but my father and I were the ones in the family who were absolutely captured by the magic of that film.

[00:30:56] Domino: We stayed, we stood in line. All day long for a midnight showing with my brother and my mother. By the time we got into the theater, my mother fell asleep and my brother liked it and he was, it was fine, but there were things that he would rather been doing. Doing. Oh yeah. But that was a moment where, Whatever that was, whatever we were experiencing, we certainly couldn’t put a, put it into words at the time.

[00:31:22] Domino: Like it solidified something between me and my father, so that we waited together for the Empire Strikes Back to come out. And, it came out at the beginning of the summer and I wanted to go and I wanted to go right. And I wanted to go, and I was like I didn’t quite understand why we weren’t going to see it.

[00:31:41] Domino: And. Part of it I thought had to do with like patience. And another part of it had to do with maybe maybe we couldn’t afford it. Yeah. Or I, you, again, there are things you didn’t talk about. So I didn’t know why we weren’t going. So that when we finally went, when we saw the film, and again, this is, I document this in the book.

[00:32:00] Domino: My father had planned ahead and he checked out from work, a micro-cassette recorder, which at the time would’ve been an incredibly expensive piece of equipment. And I I saw him pull it from his pocket. He sat it on his knee, and I didn’t know what was going on. But what he was doing is he recorded the soundtrack, he recorded the audio from the film so that we can listen to it again.

[00:32:25] Rachel: I love it.

[00:32:26] Domino: And so as a result of that, I mean he only had the audio cassette for just the weekend cuz he had to check it back in. Yeah, but we learned to listen to sound cues. We learned to analyze dialogue. What do you think, when Luke. Said, does this or like when Vader says, sorry, spoiler alert, um, no, I’m your father.

[00:32:48] Domino: Do you think he’s lying? Or yeah. So we began to close read. We didn’t know that’s what we were doing, but we were teaching ourselves to ourselves how to read film, sound, music. Yeah. Swells of music. And so my father and I were students of film. Yeah. We learned side by side.

[00:33:11] Domino: And so that’s where that interest that like That spark. That spark, yeah. Yeah. That spark came from. And so when I was thinking about the organization of this book, I always literature, whether I’m writing about literature, it usually starts with an idea in film. If I’m writing about film, it can start with an idea about film, but it often starts with an idea about literature.

[00:33:38] Domino: This is how my brain works, right? I’m constantly moving between literature and film, or if I get stuck when I’m writing something about literature, I turn to film to help me work through it. So they’re always in dialogue and. There were in early stages, people were saying things like maybe you should just write a book about literature fatherhood and literature fatherhood maybe.

[00:33:59] Domino: Right. Maybe you should write it just about film. And I was like, yeah. And so there was a lot of vacillation back and forth. It took me forever to produce this book. But if I go back to the central idea of where does it come from and how is it made, which is the second idea, right? How, like where does it come from?

[00:34:16] Domino: What are the physical condit. How is it made? This book is a representation of how scholarship, how my thinking, how knowledge production gets made. It gets made through dialogue. It gets made through the dialogue of literature and film and there’s always a personal element to that. Yes.

[00:34:38] Domino: And you cannot extract that.

[00:34:40] Domino: So that I think is a huge point. And I want us to think about that. This idea of the centrality of relational identities, relational experiences, right at the heart of pretty much all research. It’s just some people are, very transparent in the process and some folks aren’t, right?

[00:34:58] Rachel: And that’s a disciplinary question. There’s all sorts of politics around that, which we’re not gonna really be able to get into today. But I end on this place where, I want you to think back to when you first started working on this book or first started imagining it. Cuz I actually remember and do, and I have been friends for a few years now, sitting at the Starbucks on William Cannon and MoPac.

[00:35:20] Rachel: And I was still working, I’m still trying to finish my book. Trying to get, trying to still remind me third, fourth year on the tenure track. And you were working on a book, I dunno if it was this book necessarily, but will eventually would become this book. And I remember you sitting next to me going like, I think I’m gonna have to talk about my dad.

[00:35:39] Rachel: Cuz you were talking about sitting in a car and talking about Star Wars. And I was like, Cool. That sounds interesting, but like having no idea. What do you think changed? From that point where like, I, I think this is gonna be something different, but I’m not sure what to now holding the book in your hand.

[00:35:55] Domino: Yeah. In other words, are you asking what changed about why I made the decision to write about my father-in-law? Sure. That’s a tough question, but it does go back to that idea of what did you most need and what didn’t you have? And I needed to see men like my father, and that was incredibly important for me.

[00:36:20] Domino: Again, I didn’t know how important it would be. And again, going back to that idea. The Mandalorian and you have Pedro Pascal. Oh yeah. He’s the father to this his surrogate son. For those of you who don’t watch the Mandalorian, watch it, that’s what she’s saying.

[00:36:37] Domino: Watch it. I’m saying watch it. He’s from a people who have a central code, which is, this is the way, and in many ways it’s a military family, right? For sure. This is the way you do things and Yeah. Hence this is the way, yeah. And part of that code is that you never take off your helmet in the presence of anyone.

[00:36:53] Domino: You just don’t take it off and it, Mando takes it off twice. Once when he thinks he’s dying, so it doesn’t matter. And the second time, he makes a very conscious choice so that his surrogate son can touch his father’s face. Yes. And that moment is so incredibly powerful because here is a figure who’s a hero.

[00:37:17] Domino: There’s a whole show that’s built around him. Here’s somebody who sets aside this code. Because he says, this relationship with my child is more important. And that code and that he lives by, that’s his family. And he sets ’em beside. He sets all of that aside, right? And there’s a whole generation of kids.

[00:37:36] Domino: Kids like me, and kids not like me, who get to see this caring father who nurtures, who’s you know stoic, but also incredibly like funny in his own way and for sure, like tender. And those are things that I never, ever had. But I knew they existed because those were elements of my father for all of his many problems.

[00:38:05] Domino: I had a really great father, my brother had the same father, and his experience was completely different.

[00:38:11] Rachel: So this becomes very much a personal narrative in and of itself, right? That relationship.

[00:38:16] Domino: It does. And so if you’re looking for something that doesn’t exist, you have to write it into existence, even if you’re gonna critique it.

[00:38:23] Domino: Absolutely. And Domino, on that note, we are out of time.

[00:38:27] Domino: Fantastic.

[00:38:28] Rachel: But thank you, thank you so much for coming on LatinXperts. And a reminder again to our folks listening, the book is “Fatherhood In the Borderlands: A Daughter Slow Approach” by Full Professor Domino Rene Perez. You can find it at UT Press.

[00:38:41] Rachel: You can buy it on don’t go to Amazon, but you can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, your small bookstore. Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing.

[00:38:48] Domino: Thank you.

[00:38:49] Rachel: The spark with you and your dad in text for all of us.

[00:38:53] Rachel: Thank you for inviting me. It’s been a pleasure. Absolutely. Hi y’all. This is Ashley Nav Montero, the communications associate AINO Studies.

[00:39:04] Intro/Outro: Thank you for listening to this week’s episode. Make sure to check out the Latino Studies Instagram page. Follow us at Latino Studies, UT to keep the conversation going.