December 4, 2008
Rio Rancho Journal
Author Gives Race Its Due
By Juan-Carlos Rodriguez, Journal Staff WriterGrowing up in Albuquerque's North Valley, Laura Gómez never thought too much about her Hispanic heritage.
“It was just normal, in a sense,” Gómez said Wednesday.
Over the course of her life, however, race became a central theme in her academic pursuits, and on Saturday she will be celebrating the paperback release of her 2007 book, “Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race.”
The book focuses largely on the experience of the thousands of Mexican citizens who suddenly became American citizens with the signing to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Gómez also focuses on how that population's racial identity has evolved over the years.
Gómez, 44, attended Cochiti Elementary School in the North Valley, Garfield and Taft Middle Schools, and graduated from Valley High School. From there, she made a giant leap to Cambridge, Mass., where she attended and graduated from Harvard University. It was there that her heritage, such an afterthought in New Mexico, took a primary role in her consciousness.
“There were so few other Hispanics at Harvard. So in that context, I became much more personally aware,” she said.
From Harvard the North Valley girl took a job working for then freshman Sen. Jeff Bingaman in Washington, D.C. as a legislative aide working on Central American and South African issues. She said because Bingaman was so new she got to do a lot of work usually done by more senior aides. But she had to take a second job at
Lord and Taylor to make ends meet during her year in D.C.
Gómez just picked up the pace after her brief stint in the nation's capital. She was accepted to Stanford University in both the sociology Ph.D. program and at the law school. Six years later, she had accomplished both challenges.
“It wasn't an enormous task, because I liked them both,” she said of her chosen fields of study.
After she got her law degree, she clerked for a federal judge in Pasadena, Calif., who helped her get a job as a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. She taught there from 1994 until 2003, when she moved back to Albuquerque as a visiting professor, although she had an ulterior motive.
“The main reason I wanted to come back here was for my son,” Gómez said. “I really wanted him to grow up here, with all my family.”
Her gamble paid off, as in 2005 she was offered a teaching position at the University of New Mexico's law school, where she remains as a professor. She said although she had a great job at UCLA, the lure of home was too strong.
“I never went back to L.A.,” she said.
Up next for Gómez is an article she is writing about media coverage of the 2008 presidential primaries, in particular the media's treatment of the issue of Hispanic voters.
She said she has studied the articles about the primaries in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and The Dallas Morning News.
“The media tends to think very simplistically about Hispanics,” she said. “They think we're really monolithic. And you just can't do that.”