Reading as Personal Vocation: Adulthood
“The Reader” by Honoré Daumier
The summer after my freshman year of college, I found myself at Georgina Cole Library in Carlsbad, California, a fifteen-minute drive from my hometown. Having just completed my freshman year of college, my relationship to reading, and by extension books and libraries, had changed. For the first time in my life, at university, I had had to read several hours per day, from different fields like literature, politics, history, and anthropology. Even though, compared to how much I had to read in high school, the amount I was assigned to read in college was daunting, I welcomed the challenge.
Prior to the semester starting, I had bought my textbooks at the college bookstore. It was an exhilarating experience because, as the son of a single, illiterate mother, an initially undocumented immigrant, and having grown up with economic deprivation, I could not even imagine attending a university until my sophomore year of high school. Electric sensations rolled over my skin as I surveyed each lustrous book cover. My eyes vibrated excitedly in anticipation of what, specifically, was in those books.
Reading good books is paradoxical. Learning is both bliss and pain. Good books tell the human story. And the human story is tragic. We are cruel animals. That first semester, I discovered an unsettling, disturbing literary tradition: the slave narrative, specifically, Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl by Linda Brent.
Naturally, I had learned about American slavery in grade school but not like this. For the first time in my life, I learned about the experience of slavery from a slave herself. The unadulterated brutality, the abject humiliation that slaves experienced, the supernumerary arrogance of the “master,” the intractability of the wicked institution elicited a sense of rage in me that I had never experienced.
Reader, I draw no imaginary pictures of Southern homes. I am telling you the plain truth. Yet, when victims make their escape from the wild beast of Slavery, northerners consent to play the part of bloodhounds, and hunt the poor fugitive back into his den, “full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanliness.” Nay, more, they are not only willing, but proud, to give their daughters’ hands in marriage to slaveholders. The poor girls have a romantic notion of a sunny clime, and of the flowery vines that all the year round shade a happy home. To what disappointments are they destined! The young wife soon learns that the husband in whose hands he has placed her happiness pays no regard to his marriage vows. Children of every shade of complexion play with their own fair babies, and too well she knows that they were born unto him from his own household. Jealousy and hatred enter the flowery home, and it is ravaged of its loveliness. (444, The Classic Slave Narratives, Gates Jr.,, Henry Lewis, Ed.)
I learned to understand the plight of African-Americans in a raw light. I got Black anger, and as a Mexican, another historical victim of white supremacy, I felt a shared sense of solidarity in our plights. The slave narratives were my introduction to a literary tradition, the Black one, to which I would be indebted to for the rest of my life. It was my initiation into the work of the likes of bell hooks, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and others.
So, there I was, at Georgina Cole Library, the summer after my first year at college. I walked across its front garden (full of flowers and sculptures) and stepped through its front entrance as the automatic doors flung open. The librarians, with their salt and pepper hair, and bespectacled eyes, were busy at work. After walking through the lobby, I turned right, past the periodicals lounge, the computer island, the reading desks, and through to the book stacks. I gravitated towards their collection of fiction and Spanish and began to read titles of books on their spine. And like that, I happened on their array of novels by Gabriel García Márquez. I did not know who he, nor what the Nobel Prize in Literature was. However, I was captivated by the mysterious titles and grateful to find literature in my old language: Ojos de Perro Azul, Del Amor y Otros Demonios, El General En Su Laberinto. One by one, I pulled the books from the shelf and loaded them in my cradled arm like a full haul of groceries into a shopping cart.
That summer turned out to be a reacquaintance with my first language. Having just finished ten years of K-12 school, and one of university, in English, my Spanish was atrophied. As I read Márquez’s novels, I held his books in my left hand and a Spanish dictionary in my right. Yet, having to stop several times each page to look up Spanish words I had never heard before, like, “pelotón,” “diáfano,” and “sortilegio,” was worth entering Márquez’s literary universe. Each time I resumed reading after looking up a word, the text grew more robust and fecund in its ability to evoke life on the page. The difference between skimming past unknown words and consulting them in the dictionary was like that between watching silent movies in black and white and watching them in sound and color. That is how I learned that words create reality and that the ampler your vocabulary, the richer and more layered your perception is. Learning new words continues to be one of my pleasures of reading.
After college, the public library became my main source for finding new books. Being financially broke and confused about what was next in my life, I was not buying books much less building a personal library. However, I was giving my curiosity full rein. No longer being told what to read, I sensed my way through the library stacks like a literary dog, galvanized by the musty odor of books. After some floundering, I found the next book, and by extension, author, that changed my life, Killing Rage: Ending Racism by bell hooks.
In hooks, I found a voice unapologetic in its strident tone; militant and vulnerable at the same time. In the introductory essay, hooks describes being subject to racist and sexist treatment by airline staff during routine air travel in the United States. (As I learned recently at the Jackie Robinson Museum in New York City, during Jim Crow, it was common for black travelers to be booted off a plane to accommodate white travelers.) While hooks grew up under Jim Crow, the incident she describes at the airport is far removed from that era, and pales in comparison to what Robinson experienced, but the discrimination that hooks experienced was real and no less degrading. In her narration of the incident, hooks is not diplomatic, “moderate,” or long-suffering. She is direct, critical, and unashamed of her anger. I recognized the rage she described as she traversed her ordeal as the same that I felt while reading the slave narratives years earlier.
hooks introduced me to radical feminism and transformed my life. It was through hooks’ books that I came to thoroughly understand the patriarchy and what to do about it. After reading most of hooks’ oeuvre I was a different person. I was aware of how I was patriarchal (passively and actively,) I worked to transform my masculinity, from a patriarchal mode to a humanist one. This included allowing myself to express emotions other than anger, and when I expressed anger, to do it nonviolently.
On another evening during my twenties, I was surfing the web when I happened on the work of Mexican novelist Malú Huacuja del Toro. The article of hers that I found was about how then-President of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, silenced Mexican, or Mexico-living, intellectuals of the stature of Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez, concerning his effort to enact the North American Free Trade Agreement, by creating a national system of federally-funded grants for artists and intellectuals that rewarded this class of people for their silence. While learning this history was, in itself, eye-opening, it was Huacuja’s novel, Un Dios para Cordelia, published by Océano in 1995, that captured my imagination and became one of the books of my life. Regrettably, this novel is only available in Spanish.
Un Dios para Cordelia is about an industry-manufactured pop star named Cordelia who, after discovering her voice double’s true singing talent, decides to have her assassinated. This decision is Cordelia’s first in her life. Until then, her life has been choreographed, first by her power-lusting mother and then by her record-label handlers. While Cordelia is endowed with great physical beauty, making her the object of envy and idolatry of the young women of her society, while she is rich and powerful in a nation full of people victimized by obscene economic inequality, she lacks true agency. All her professional, and by extension, her personal decisions are made for her, from the kind of music she “makes,” to how she dresses, to how she sounds on record. Iris is only one more accessory in Cordelia’s vast celebrity production.
As Cordelia’s voice double, Iris is the true voice of Cordelia. So, when by happenstance, Cordelia (who does not even know Iris) catches Iris singing in the studio during off-hours, witnessing what Iris truly sounds like and not just how she sounds on Cordelia’s records, she is filled with a burning sense of envy and helplessness before Iris’s shimmering voice. And not knowing how to do anything else before mystery except to destroy it, she decides that Iris must perish from the earth.
Another influential author in my life has been journalist Chris Hedges. Hedges is a former war correspondent who covered the Central American civil wars of the 1980’s, the first Gulf War, Sarajevo, and others. In the first chapter of his book, Losing Moses on the Freeway: The Ten Commandments in America, Hedges narrates how he decided to become a war correspondent.
After he finished his undergraduate education, he entered the Harvard Divinity School with the goal of becoming an “inner city pastor” and “saving” the poor. Yet, while at Harvard, he becomes disillusioned by the liberation theologists who “love the poor but do not like the smell of the poor.” At the same time that Hedges is completing his Masters at Harvard, he takes up the pastorship at a church in the Roxbury Projects of Boston.
It is as a result of this experience that he realizes the foolishness and grandiosity of his goal to become an “inner city pastor” who helps the downtrodden escape extreme poverty. While on the one hand, in school, he listens to lectures that idealize the oppressed and discuss the power of the Gospel to lift people up, on the streets of Roxbury he sees, first-hand, the slow drip of oppression that keep poor people down as well as the white privilege that safeguards him and always remains available to control the poor. The contradiction forces him to complete his degree but also give up on a career in the church. Instead, he decides that the best way for him to fight fascism is to report on war.
This is one of ten stories that Hedges narrates in Losing Moses on the Freeway, a book that I return to repeatedly for its effective summation of how the Decalogue is relevant to modern life. Hedges’s book changed my views on faith and it helped me view my life in a moral context. The book forced me, a previously avowed “intellectual” and “secularist,” to think about sin, both in terms of what it is and, most importantly, how I sin.
In the chapter on greed in Hedges’s book, he discusses the story of Karen Adey. Adey is a follower of self-help guru Tony Robbins. Under Robbins’ tutelage, Adey dreams of the kind of fabulous wealth that will afford her mansions, exotic vacations, and the adulation and solicitude of her own followers.
Adey says that the desire for wealth is not an end in itself. She hopes to attain wealth to do good. She does not see Robbins, or the techniques he teaches, as ones that are about coveting wealth and power. Yet the allure of fabulous wealth and power, and the respect and awe that comes with them, is the staple of his message, like that of television advertising and entertainment… [Fabulous wealth] appears, although this is part of the mirage, to be within our grasp if we pull the right levers and mutter the right incantations.
Although I am not a follower of Robbins, the striking resemblance between Adey’s dreams of material success and power and my own aspirations of literary triumph was impossible to ignore or brush aside. As a young man, I misunderstood the purpose of writing literature. I saw it as a vehicle to obtain celebrity and all that fame promises to a young, patriarchal man: adoring fans, status, and sex. Today, I am not completely certain about why humans should write, but now I understand, in large part thanks to Hedges’s book, that it is not to become famous and attain power and privilege.
These days I hold down an ordinary office job, I am married, and read and write after I meet my financial and personal obligations. While I still hope to one day write books of value and excellence, I have jettisoned my fever dreams of literary superstardom and all the entitlements that that, at least in a Hollywood movie, promise a person.
Today, reading, for me, is both a discipline and a fortress. I am not a casual reader. That is, I do not read merely when “time permits.” Just as others keep “bucket lists” of places they want to visit and experiences they want to have, I keep a long list of great works of literature that I want to read, or re-read. Currently, I am re-reading Don Quixote, which I first read as an undergraduate. In 2026, I hope to start Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, a behemoth of a work.
It is not possible to finish reading works of this length and complexity casually. As a baseline, I read fifteen minutes in the morning, another fifteen in the afternoon, and a final quarter of an hour in the evening. This baseline usually builds a momentum that often pushes me to read beyond my prescribed fifteen minutes. The practice of reading great books shields me, at least for the forty-five minutes that I commit to reading daily, from the frivolous and salacious cant of our world. It organizes and settles my mind. It entertains and educates me. It fills me with an extraordinary ecstasy.