Andrea Oñate-Madrazo is a historian and Latin American history professor at California Polytechnic State University. Among some of the classes she teaches are Comparative Social Movements, Modern Latin America and Subversion in Latin America. I talked with her over zoom about her life, Latin American history, the importance of learning about Latin America and social movements.
Professor Oñate-Madrazo had a very atypical upbringing, initially being born in Mexico City and at age seven, moving to Washington D.C. for a year and a half. After Washington D.C., she moved back to Mexico until the age of 13. She then moved abroad to London, where she spent her teenage years, and Holland, where she finished her junior and senior year. Her father’s profession as someone in the Mexican Diplomatic Core required Oñate-Madrazo’s family to move around a lot.
While her family was still in Mexico City, Oñate-Madrazo went to New York University where she studied history and political science. She faced many challenges living by herself in New York City and felt a lack of institutional support from the university. She focused on her academic life, double majoring in history and political science. Oñate-Madrazo’s goal was to be a human rights lawyer, but financial issues surrounding law school were pressing and citizenship was an obstacle when it came to applying for scholarships.
Out of school, she worked for a NGO, non-governmental organization, called Human Rights Watch. She worked in the Americas Division, where her work was centered on Latin America. Deciding to go back to Mexico for law school, she found herself in a very distant state.
“I felt such a disconnect with Mexico. I felt like more of a foreigner in Mexico than I did in New York and London” Oñate-Madrazo said.
In Mexico, after high school, students go straight into law school, so her classmates were much younger than she was, creating a social divide. And academically, the work was not challenging enough.
“I had a little bit of a crisis of faith because the trajectory I had always set for myself came crumbling down,” Oñate-Madrazo said.
After deciding to apply to graduate programs in the U.S. for her doctorate, or PhD, she settled on Princeton University. At Princeton, Oñate-Madrazo felt supported institutionally. She had amazing professors, friends, mentors and advisors. It was at Princeton she received a PhD in Latin American History.
Her last year of graduate school, she was debating whether to stay in the U.S. or go back to Mexico. She was offered a job in the human rights division of a branch of the Mexican government of the interior ministry. There, she started to do unpaid work for this branch. At the time, the drug lord, El Chapo Guzmán, who was in prison, escaped. There was little doubt that his escape was in collaboration with the authorities. The governmental division that oversees security in high federal prisons was the area she was supposed to work for, so they froze the budget until a thorough investigation. Some time after, there still had been no conclusive answers as to whether or not she would be working there. She felt relieved by this. It was then she realized how much she was gonna miss the academic life.
Her last year at Princeton, she started teaching as a preceptor, or teaching assistant. She fell in love with teaching.
“It was this really remarkable thing where, from the first day that I was in front of a classroom, I felt like I was in my element. I loved it” Oñate-Madrazo said.
A short period after her graduation from Princeton in 2016, Oñate-Madrazo started working for California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Her first few years at Cal Poly, she taught Comparative Social Movements and World History. Her second year, she started teaching Latin American history.
Why is it important to learn about Latin American history?
“Well particularly in the U.S. and in a U.S. context, I think that it is so important for students to learn about Latin American history because they’re our most immediate neighbors. The U.S. exerts a tremendous amount of influence and has a tremendous amount of power over Latin America. I think that every Latin American is aware of who the president of the United States is, what the broad history of the U.S. is because they are so influenced by it. I think that few Americans, few United States Americans, know very much about a region that they exert so much power over. The truth is, you can say, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter to the U.S. because Latin America doesn’t have that same power.’ And the truth is, it doesn’t in the most obvious sense, but Latin American politics influence the U.S. in very meaningful ways. I think the most evident of them is that the LatinX community is the largest growing demographic in the United States. And this large-scale immigration of Latin Americans into the United States is not independent of U.S. policy. Beyond that, it’s the fact that Latin America is the most important commercial partner of the U.S., and that you have this constant flow of people across the U.S. Latin American border. It’s also the case that Latin America has been a very important force, or influence, in shaping global processes that we perhaps don’t know or hear about much. So, the ways in which we, for example, understand democracy, the ways in which we understand human rights, the ways in which we understand sovereignty, and autonomy and social mobilization. Latin America has had an important influence with that on the global stage. Beyond that, the cultural influences of Latin America in the US are so prevalent. Studying Latin America is a better way to understand ourselves and our neighbors.”
“There is an American journalist called James Reston who said that the U.S. would do anything for Latin America except read about it. And it’s true that most US citizens know very little about their southern neighbors. And they assume that the U.S. can just impose its will on the region. So, I think that university students, and I hope that my students, set out to prove Reston wrong. I hope that they invest the time and resources to learn about the region that is south of the border. I think it’s anachronistic to think that Latin America is exogenous, that it’s something outside of the United States, because large sections of the U.S. have become Latinized by the influence of migrants. Many major U.S. cities now have more children from Spanish-speaking families than from any other group. So these Latin American immigrants and their children and grandchildren are a vital part of our economy, our society, our culture. In understanding them, we are also understanding ourselves.”
Were you involved with any social movements during your time in college?
“My first actual involvement was when I was at NYU. My junior year I became involved with a movement that was called Save Darfur. Save Darfur was a student-run social movement that started across U.S. campuses to raise awareness about the genocide taking place in the southern Sudanese region of Darfur. And, particularly to divest money away from the regime in Sudan because a lot of these universities, including my own, had investments with China, and China was the main supporter of the military regime in Sudan that was committing this genocide. So, that was my first real engagement with a social movement and it involved things like organizing marches and creating and distributing flyers, trying to get other students involved, and attending protests. And then I got involved with a number of other things. I went to several pro-immigration rallies in the U.S. It was something I had to be careful with because I was there on a student visa, so the fear of getting arrested and deported, I never did anything illegal, but even being at a protest, sometimes people get taken in for different reasons. In Mexico, I was involved in a social movement to try and open up the political system and to try to get the option of having independent candidates run for office. Mexico had a pretty strong stranglehold on the electoral system by the three dominant parties. When I came back to Princeton, Occupy Wall Street happened, so I was able to get involved in that and a number of other things.”
If you are interested in reading about some of Andrea Oñate-Madrazo’s work, she has written “Bringing the War to Mexico,” a review of Halbert Jones’ The War Has Has Brought Peace to Mexico and a “Review of Piero Gleijeses’ La Esperanza Desgarrada.” She also has a dissertation on the Salvadoran Civil War called, “Insurgent Diplomacy: The Internationalized Revolutions of Nicaragua and El Salvador, 1976-1992.”