Ricardo Ortiz

Associate Professor of U.S. Latino Literature and Culture, Department of English; Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English
Hometown: Los Angeles, Calif.
Education: B.A. Stanford University, English and Economics; M.A. University of California, Los Angeles, English; Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles, English
Area of research: U.S. Latino literature

Can you talk a bit about your path to Georgetown, how long you have been here and how you came to be here?
Well I came to be here because at some point in my life I felt that I wanted to be a professor, I wanted to be a scholar of literary history and literary practice, and so all of this probably started when I started reading as a kid. I was as much an obsessive reader as I was obsessed about anything else growing up and that’s something that followed me through college. I went to Stanford and was a double major in English and economics, English for me and economics for my parents. I did much better in English than I did in econ and I kind of learned there that I had a vocation to do teaching and intellectual work. Ended up doing my doctoral work at UCLA and had a couple of jobs at other schools in the tenure track and for one reason or another didn’t want to end up working at either one, so I ended up at Georgetown in 1998. I am still the only person Georgetown has ever hired into a tenure line job to teach anything about U.S. Latinos for any reason, and what we do is teach the literature of U.S. Latinos, that’s what I specialize in. So I’ve been doing that for 16 years now. In some ways, I feel that I am glad that I took a couple of chances with other schools to figure out what I wanted and I’m really, really delighted I landed at Georgetown because it feels like a really good fit for me. I’ve been happy here since I got here and the year I applied for this job, it was the only job I applied for and I knew I would get it.

You mentioned being the only person hired to teach U.S. Latino Literature. Is that something that bothers you?
I think it’s a really interesting thing at this point, in 2014. The message it sends to the world is that Georgetown thinks that the only contribution worth teaching of the largest cultural minority in this country is literary. So right now that’s a fact that’s out there in the world. I’m the only tenure-line hire, so if they’ve ever hired anyone else to do U.S. Latino history or theater or sociology, it wasn’t into a tenure-line job where that was the main thing they would be doing. 

Is that something you’ve pushed back against?
I’ve made this exact statement in many different public settings in my time at Georgetown and it continues to be true. I don’t know if that’s pushback or not, but it’s just something that I think people should be aware of.

How do your research and teaching relate and inform each other?
I think it’s both and I think it’s reciprocal. They are sort of mutually informing of one another. I can imagine why there would be different answers depending on both the individual and where they are in their career because the dynamic is different for someone coming out of a doctoral program and into their first tenure line job as opposed to someone like me who has sort of been out of a Ph.D. program for more than 20 years. My sense of my relationship to the research I was doing early on and how that played a role in how I was a teacher early in my career, all that has sort of shifted since my first book was published and I landed here and realized that one of the things I wanted to do in addition to my research and teaching was to serve the institution, serve the university and work in an administrative position, sort of service work. This has been a unique phase in my career since my first book came out in 2007, seven years ago. I feel like in this particular phase, the ideas that I’ve had, that have gone into the types of books I want to write, what I would call my research, I can actually field them and test them out in classes where really smart Georgetown students can help me think through readings and texts that then become what I publish. So that’s where I am now, teaching is helping my research now but I teach certain classes because they reflect my research interests. So it’s still primarily reciprocal.

If there were one thing – all the money, all the power – that you could change at Georgetown what would it be?
Institutions are large and complicated structures and there never perfect. And there’s no such thing as a utopian institution, especially a university. I don’t envy any colleague of mine at another school because I think they are at a better school than I am. Which is not saying Georgetown is the best and I think it’s the best place in the world but it’s doing everything as well as it could. Alright, here’s an easy, practical answer: I really wish they had built an endowment in the 20th century that would rival Harvard. Money doesn’t change everything but it changes a lot of things and many of the things I would seek to change at Georgetown, the answer I get is money.

Interview by Evan Hollander