Patty Vest:         Welcome to Sagecast. The podcast of Pomona College. I'm Patty Vest.

Mark Wood:          I'm Mark Wood. This season Sagecast, we're talking with a variety of Pomona College faculty members about how they came to study what they study, teach what they teach, and love the field they love.

Patty Vest:         Today, we're talking with professor of history and Chicana and Latina studies Miguel Tinker Salas, an expert in political and social issues facing Latin America, with particular interest in Venezuela and Mexico.

Patty Vest:         Since we're going to be talking about current events, you should know that this is being recorded on January 22nd, the week of an unsuccessful coup in Venezuela.

Mark Wood:          Welcome, Miguel.

Tinker Salas:       Thank you very much, pleasure to be here and to be opening up this new space for conversation with faculty, with staff, administrators, with the community, with the alumni, and with the students.

Patty Vest:         Excellent.

Mark Wood:          Great. As we speak, Venezuela is in the news again with our quashed military revolt. Let's start there. What do you know about what's going on, and does it even surprise you?

Tinker Salas:       No. As most of you are familiar, there is a level of instability in Venezuela, particularly after the swearing-in of Nicolás Maduro for his second term. The opposition has made it a point that they do not want to let him consolidate his power, they fear that if he's able to govern for the next six years, they will no longer be able to compete in the electoral arena, and they have put all their eggs in one basket at this point. That's essentially to delimitate Nicolás Maduro as the president of Venezuela after highly contested elections in the middle of last year. To accomplish that, what they've managed to do is to garner a significant amount of international support with the United States taking the lead and what was called before, the Group of Lima.

Tinker Salas:       The Group of Lima tends to be the most conservative governments in Latin America, Brazil, Columbia, Argentina, Chile, and they refuse to recognize the presidency of Nicolás Maduro, and the opposition, in many ways, has given up on an internal strategy for Venezuela and is essentially lobbying for international de-legitimization of Nicolás Maduro by having other countries refuse to recognize his legitimacy and therefore transfer power to the president of the national assembly in a very highly difficult strategy because, essentially, you are letting other countries dictate internal policy within Venezuela, and that may backfire. That may backfire where the population that is opposed to foreign intervention, whether it's political or military, so that there is a ... It's a high-risk strategy in which, at the end, might actually backfire and might help Nicolás Maduro consolidate power rather than weaken him.

Patty Vest:         I want to pivot a little bit on Venezuela and start a little bit, let's say, from the beginning. Venezuela is more than an academic interest for you. It's where you spent time, had some personal stories around. Can you tell us a little bit about that, the time you spent there?

Tinker Salas:       I was born in Venezuela. I am the son of a North American oil worker, and a Venezuelan laboratory technician, both of whom worked in the oil industry, and I was born and raised in Eastern Venezuela in an oil town called Caripito in the state Monagas in Venezuela in Easter Venezuela. I'm the product of much of what I write about. I'm the product of that oil industry, of that oil experience, of that process of acculturation that took place in Venezuela, so even as a child growing up, I lived in two diverse experiences.

Tinker Salas:       On the one hand, I lived in the Venezuelan society, spoke Spanish, all my friends were Venezuelan. On the other, I went to school in a US oil company school. It was controlled by Creole Petroleum Corporation, but even there, it was interesting because they had to hire Spanish-speaking teacher sometimes, so many of our teachers were Mexican-American from Texas. We had a bilingual, bi-cultural world emerging. The curriculum was both in Spanish and English. It was an interesting experiment because they were employing the Venezuelan official curriculum, and it was in overlay, the US official curriculum as well. One learned the history of both countries, both experiences in both languages at the same time while living in a larger Venezuelan community.

Patty Vest:         Tell us a little bit about what your daily would look like?

Tinker Salas:       Well, my mother, we lived outside of the oil camp. We lived in the community Calle Los Mangos. That was done consciously. My parents did not want to raise me in that kind of American enclave, what they called later Peyton Place. For those generationally-challenged can remember, the small community where the social norms were dictated by a particular set of individuals.

Tinker Salas:       She would take me into the oil camp school every day, and then she would bring me back into the community. My father would go after work in the refinery or sometimes, he would go after work on a pipeline crew, and sometimes, he would come back home covered in oil. One our tasks was to take kerosine and wash him down, and get it out of his hair, and get it out of his clothes, and then essentially get rid of his clothes.

Tinker Salas:       We actually did live with oil, and not only live with oil in the sense that my father and the stained clothes, but actually, in our town, there was actually tar deposits on the surface. You could actually see it and play with it. [Foreign language 00:05:45] fields of tar were not that far away, and these were large kilometer-long fields. As kids, we would run out there and see who would sink the fastest or run back the fastest.

Tinker Salas:       There were also gas, natural gas, and we would like a match and throw it, and you see the gas fly up. We actually did live actually with oil around us, and it was everywhere. It was everywhere in this small town that was central. It was a small town in the eastern rainforest of Venezuela that proved to be central to an export economy and to a war and international economy because it had oil. In that sense, that's what we also have American televisions and everything else in that small town of 5,000 people.

Patty Vest:         What does that town look like now?

Tinker Salas:       It has never been able to recover because, again, it was an industry town. Once the refinery ceased, once oil was no longer exported down San Juan River, the town fell on hard times. They had tried to process mangle, which is the lumber, the mangroves that grew in the rainforest. They were unable to, so it's fallen on hard times. It has one of the most important carnivals in Venezuela, the carnival in Caripito. It draws people. The city still draws people for particular periods of time during carnival, but it remains in hard times.

Mark Wood:          Living with the oil industry the way you did, sort of in the middle of it, do you that had an impact on you, long-term, in your thinking, in your view of the political situation and so on?

Tinker Salas:       Not so much the political situation, but it obviously affected how viewed the country, how I experienced the country. It was obvious, most company employees lived in the oil camp. Understand that most North Americans lived behind a barbed wire fence. They lived in a protected enclave, essentially an enclave that reproduced US society. You had the oil company school. You had the oil company commissary. You had the oil company social club that served hamburgers and French fries and Coca-Cola, and you had the pool, and you had the basketball field, and you had the baseball field, and you had the tennis courts.

Tinker Salas:       Then you had the other Venezuela, the one that lived in the shadows of the oil industry. My parents opted, because they were a mixed couple, to live on the Venezuelan society. I would intrude into the US camp to go to school or social functions, but we lived in a rural community Calle Los Mangos, which was on the outskirts of Caripito, my hometown, and it was a whole different world, one which you saw the poverty, one in which you saw the inequality, one in which you did not see that oil as that key agent changing everyone's life, and it gave you a very clear perspective. I detailed that in my book, The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society, in which I start by telling people exactly where I fit into this equation, how that perspective influenced how I viewed Venezuela oil culture, oil society, and oil as an instrument of social and political change.

Patty Vest:         Did your experience in Venezuela, was that what framed or made you want to study the history and politics of these countries, or tell us a little bit about that?

Tinker Salas:       When I was an undergraduate at the University of California San Diego, no one mentioned Venezuela. No one studied Venezuela. Venezuela was a, quote, unquote, what I've called in another book, an "exceptional country." It had a model democracy. It didn't have any major class schisms. It seemed to have resolved racial problems because everybody was intermixed and there was café con leche. There was a mixture of coffee and milk. Therefore, it didn't draw the attention.

Tinker Salas:       People gravitated towards the geopolitical equation how the US viewed Latin America. First was Mexico because that was the neighbor. Then it was the large countries, the geopolitically important countries, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, what people call the ABCs. Then it was wherever there was a revolution. If there was one in Cuba, people studied Cuba. If there was one in Nicaragua, people studied Nicaragua to understand what caused the revolution.

Tinker Salas:       As a student growing up, you would hear about Simón Bolívar because, obviously, he was this important figure in independence, and then you would hear nothing else about Venezuela except that maybe it had a lot of oil. We studied Mexico. We studied Argentina. We studied Brazil and Chile. When I came back as a grad student and said I wanted to study Venezuela, all the faculty advised against it. They said, "You'll never find a job," because, again, you need to study the countries that are geopolitically important for the US.

Tinker Salas:       They never quite said it that way. They didn't say, "These are the countries that the state department thinks it's geopolitically important," because, after all, still, money followed the geopolitical concerns. The fellowships were there to study Mexico. The fellowships were there to study Argentina or Brazil or Chile. I got the hint. With all my interest anyway, I very much loved Mexico. I've been exposed to Mexico since I came to the US that I willfully studied Mexico and did a dissertation on Northwest Mexico and its transformation during the revolution, and that was my first book from the University of California Press.

Mark Wood:          Help us understand the role of oil in Venezuelan history, its politics, its culture, its economy.

Tinker Salas:       Oil is discovered in 1914 in the western part of Venezuela as a commercially-viable product. It existed always in Venezuela. When the Spanish arrived, they document the presence of oil on the surface. They document its process, its existence. They use it to caulk their ships. They even sent it back as a medicine for arthritis for the king. It didn't quite do the job though, but in essence, oil was always there. The problem was there wasn't an internal combustion engine that needed oil.

Patty Vest:         Right.

Tinker Salas:       The real transformation for oil comes when the British Navy, beginning in the early part of the 1900s, decides to go from coal to oil-powered ships. The US does the same thing shortly thereafter, and therefore, there was now a need for oil on an important commercially viable basis. British and American interest began looking for oil deposits in Mexico initially, and then in Venezuela. By 1922, by December 1922, these massive deposits are found in Venezuela with one oil well spewing over 100,000 barrels a day. Therefore, Venezuela becomes the epicenter of oil

Tinker Salas:       Oil permits then dictator Juan Vicente Gómez to consolidate power. Because the oil companies want the stability provided by a military dictator, the US sends military advisors. The US sends its navy to support Juan Vicente Gómez. Oil holds the promise of change, but in essence, it becomes the mechanism by which the dictator can consolidate power and hold power from 1908 to 1935.

Tinker Salas:       Oil increasingly becomes the lifeblood of the country. Venezuela, by the middle of 1930s, has become the world's largest exporter of oil, not to be confused with the producer, but the largest exporter of oil. Throughout that whole period, oil held the promise of change. It was going to transform Venezuela. It was going to bring modernity. It was going to bring social change. It did to a certain extent. If you went to the major and urban centers, they were being transformed, the cities were growing. We're booming. The war period proved the importance of oil.

Tinker Salas:       General Frank Maxwell, head of the Caribbean command, says, "Of all the countries in Latin America, I only need one, Venezuela. It is beautifully rich in oil," his exact words, so that, again, it highlighted that with access to Venezuela and oil, the US Navy could power its vessels. It had access to oil. It could fuel the US industrial economy. Again, it highlighted the importance of oil. Even though there was a democratic period there in the 1945 to '48, oil, once again, served to reinforce dictatorship, and Venezuela lived under dictatorship until 1958.

Tinker Salas:       Oil, nonetheless, did transform the country for certain sectors. Caracas became a modern metropolis, the highest cost of living in Latin America, which meant that most people couldn't afford to buy the average goods they needed. It had multiple airline services to Washington. Eventually, it had direct concord flights to Paris for those who could afford it, the first Pierre Cardin and Christian Dior stores in Latin America. Shortly thereafter, Sears followed, and so did all the other symbols of US cultural modernity and society. Oil was a transformative element in Venezuelan society, but again, within certain parameters and certain limits.

Patty Vest:         You've just mentioned how oil was influential in Venezuela's history and its economic boom. Now, it's portrayed in the media as this economic basket case and political powder keg. Can you tell us how accurate is that depiction? Where is Venezuela now?

Tinker Salas:       Well, it's interesting how you post it because Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, the Minister of Petroleum in the late '50s, early '60s coined the phrase, the excrement of the devil. Oil is the excrement of the devil.

Patty Vest:         Right color too.

Tinker Salas:       He drew that from a Spanish travel log in the early 1500s when the Spanish arrived and they saw oil floating in the surface. The indigenous actually told them they had already labeled it the excrement of the devil. There has always been that kind of relationship with oil in the country in terms of the kind of symbol it represented. For certain sectors, it's represented change, modernity, and for others, it represented simply a dependent relationship that tied Venezuela to the US, and that exposed the vulnerabilities of the Venezuelan economy. I think that the current situation has exposed those once again.

Tinker Salas:       Under Hugo Chávez, Chávez set out the reframe the model, to take oil and to utilize the profits derived from oil to transform the society in a very rapid, dramatic fashion. He also set out to certify Venezuela's oil deposits which have been kept somewhat not fully certified by the previous governments. That meant that with the addition of the heavy crude deposits on the Orinoco Delta basin, Venezuela has the highest deposits of oil, the largest deposits of oil in the world, greater than Saudi Arabia. The problem with that is that it's heavy crude, and heavy crude requires extra refining, and, ironically, involves importing light crude, in some cases, from the US to mix with the heavy crude so that you can actually be able to commercially sell it as crude.

Tinker Salas:       Therein lies the contradiction. That expanded increment of Venezuela's reserves simply heightened the dependence at a time in which the population was growing, at the time in which the demands on oil were greater, and the time in which the government was intent on transforming society but was not investing in the infrastructure, was not investing in the actual industry which was required to propel this transformation forward, so that in many cases, part of the conditions that we see today has been because of the lack of investment in infrastructure, and I think something else.

Tinker Salas:       I think, fundamentally, the issue of the heavy crude is a flawed presentation of the issues in Venezuela. Venezuela would've been much better off focusing on attempting to produce light crude and finding ways of extracting further light crude from wells that have already been drilled rather than focusing on something that is so complicated as heavy crude, and that requires more refining, more investment, and a higher point of production and the cost, which means that the barrel of oil has to be at a higher price for the country to have a profit.

Tinker Salas:       Now, that's only part of the problem. The other part of the problem is how politics have turned into a zero-sum game in Venezuela, one in which the government has increasingly become more authoritarian, has moved increasingly consolidate power vis-à-vis an opposition that has also become more violent. Again, the two of them have failed to recognize the existence of the other. They act as if this is a zero-sum game. What Venezuelans really need to address is how to reconcile those differences, how to create a political process under which they recognize the presence of the other, and they can assure some level of governability, because, otherwise, if the Chávistas are defeated tomorrow, they will assume the position of opposition, and will repeat this whole process.

Tinker Salas:       Likewise, if the Chávistas are confirmed in power, the opposition is not going anywhere. The Chávistas are not going anywhere, so the future has to be how to find some middle ground where you can create conditions that permit to reconcile differences and to create conditions of governability to tackle the real series issues, dependence on oil, corruption, crime, inequality because though the government may have initially tackled poverty, the realities of poverty increased again, and poverty is a factor again, as are shortages of food, of medicine, and of other basic products that the country has been forced to import.

Tinker Salas:       Remember when I said earlier that beginning in the 1930s, Venezuela became the world's leading export of oil? It also became a net importer of food. At the same time, it also, in the same decade, became a net importer of the basic goods it consumed because most people increasingly moved from the rural to the urban areas, abandoned the countryside, agricultural production declined, not that Venezuela's agricultural production was ever sufficient to provide for the basic goods, but with oil, there was now a alternative to working in agriculture that paid much better, and increasingly, people became dependent on the state, long before Chávez, long before Chávez, people became dependent on the state to provide for those basic goods. It created a relationship that continues to be a factor in Venezuela.

Mark Wood:          Of course, now, there's also hyperinflation to deal with, and the numbers are kind of staggering.

Tinker Salas:       A million percent inflation.

Mark Wood:          Yeah, and I read somewhere it could be up to 10 million percent next year.

Tinker Salas:       That's right. When Maduro has announced economic measures, for example, a few weeks ago that the new salaries will go up to 18,000, well, the price of food went up equally at the same time, and essentially nullify whatever increase there was.

Mark Wood:          What does that mean for people's lives?

Tinker Salas:       What that means is that the price of goods change every day, that people are chasing a smaller amount of goods, that people are hoarding, that some companies horde as well to ensure that they get a higher price the next day, and it's something that's untenable. It's largely untenable. It also means that subsidized products, because here's part of that issue we raised earlier, that the government sets prices, many of the products are subsidized, gasoline is subsidized, the cheapest gasoline in the world, except that it winds up going to Columbia or to Brazil because you can sell it at market prices in those area, or products go across the border, or they get put on the informal market where the prices are raised.

Tinker Salas:       Again, you have a multiplicity of challenge to tackle in being able to provide for a society that is dependent on oil and dependent on a state to provide those products. What troubling to me is that neither the government or the opposition has an answer to those questions. They have not grappled with how to deal with the dependence. They have not grappled with how to improve the economy. They have not grappled with how to address corruption, which is an age-old problem in Venezuela, that has mushroomed in recent years, but again, it's an age-old problem. There's an old saying in Venezuela, [foreign language 00:23:31], don't give me any money. Just put me where I can make my own money.

Patty Vest:         You touched a little bit earlier on this, but Vice President Pence released a message supporting the opposition and urging resistance as well given the recent activity against the government in Venezuela, what are your thoughts about that, and what has been the role of the US in that situation?

Tinker Salas:       As a historian, it brings back to mind that every time the US has done something like that, it's backfired, whether it was in Argentina against Perón, when Perón ran for president and the US put out a consultation with the Republic of the Americas that blasted Perón. Perón was able to use that to rally support behind himself. When it attempted to do something like that in Cuba or with the Bay of Pigs or in other times, with intervention, it has backfired. Venezuela is entering a very, very difficult period, and any action on the part of the US can actually backfire and permit Maduro to consolidate power by saying it's either me or the US. It's either you support me or you're going to get the US governing Venezuela.

Tinker Salas:       Again, to the extent that Pence or anybody else in this administration does something like that, it really does fuel that argument that Maduro is often quoted as saying, "They're trying to intervene. They're trying to intervene," and creates conditions that are not, I think, fruitful for Venezuelans themselves resolving these issues because, in the end, it's Venezuelans who are going to govern the country. It's Venezuelans who are going to have to resolve their differences. It's Venezuelans who are going to have to come to terms with whatever happens in that country. It's not Mike Pence. It's not Donald Trump. It's not Marco Rubio.

Mark Wood:          In a way, that's a problem the US seems to ... A mistake the US seems to make rather frequently in Latin America with villainizing some leader. We always seem to have villains in Latin America, Castro, and Noriega, and then Chávez, now, Maduro. Why do you think that is?

Tinker Salas:       Well, it's always easier to rally against an enemy and not just Latin America. Let's not talk about Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria or everywhere else the US finds, and then we talk about the access of evil where we connect to Latin America with the Middle East and with Iran, where we talk now in Pence language, the troika ... No, I'm sorry, in John Bolton Pence language, the troika of tyranny in Latin America which is Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and we were going to overthrow all three governments.

Tinker Salas:       Well, that didn't do too well in Iraq. It didn't do too well in Afghanistan. Unless the US is willing to engage in nation-building in Latin America, a fail policy, I would suggest, at best, a naïve at worst. I think that the best solution for Latin America is for Latin Americans to solve their own issues and to allow that to happen in the context of sovereignty, of none ... This is where Mexico has played a very important role and that the change in presidency in Mexico and the return to what's called the Estrada Doctrine where Mexico asserts that it supports self-determination, national sovereignty, and promotes resolution of conflicts with peaceful negotiation.

Tinker Salas:       Mexico up until the election of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was a member of the Lima Group. Now that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has returned, has taken power in Mexico and was elected president, Mexico has essentially withdrawn symbolically from the Lima Group, asserting that the issues in Venezuela must be resolved by Venezuelans. The issues in Nicaragua must be resolved by Nicaraguans, and the same way, the issues in Mexico must be resolved by Mexicans.

Patty Vest:         It's a perfect transition into Mexico. That's where we want to go next. Why is it so imp for us to study Mexico's political and social history?

Tinker Salas:       If nothing else, because we're neighbors and we share a 2,000-mile long border between both countries. Mexico is not just in Mexico. Mexico is right here.

Patty Vest:         Yeah.

Tinker Salas:       To deny the fact that we are living in territory that was once Mexico, just thinking San Antonio, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and think about what that means, and think about the fact that Mexico is more than just a neighbor. It's an integral part of the social fabric of the US. As much as some people would want to deny it, I don't know if anyone saw the little spoof that was running online that claimed to do DNA test on people who claimed-

Patty Vest:         The airline.

Tinker Salas:       The airline who claimed that they were anti-Mexican until they were told that they have 25% Mexican, they would be given a 25% discount on Aeroméxico. I found that to be hilarious because, again, these individuals were saying, "Well, we hate Mexico, but we love burritos. We hate Mexico, but we love tacos. We love our nachos." It is that kind of contradiction where people can actually talk about this like for a country that is so much a part of their own life. That's what's so troubling about this discussion of a wall.

Tinker Salas:       I travel across the border on a monthly basis, and increasingly, the US-Mexican border is starting to look like Checkpoint Charlie in the height of the Cold War. All that's missing is the machine gun turrets because we have the lights. We have the barbed wire. We have the fences. We have the military presence. We have the border patrol and presence. We have the satellites, the radars, the magnetic rays. We have it all. Yet, it is a country with which we share a border, share a population, share DNA, and it's been a part of the US history since its very beginning, the same way that anti-Mexican sentiment has been a part of US history with the beginning of Manifest Destiny.

Tinker Salas:       If you think about how the US framed its own identity, it was vis-à-vis Mexico. It was in pushing towards Texas. It was in pushing towards New Mexico, Arizona, and California that the US began to define what it meant to be an Anglo because they became the other against which the US framed their own identity, and that continues in many ways today, and the heated debate around the border and about the wall has reframed it. When the president says there can be no nation without borders, what he's saying is that those borders protects a certain identity, a certain point of view, a certain ethnicity, a certain race. When, in fact, those boundaries are open to commerce, to trade to interaction, to migration. What's really needed is how to reconcile those differences and find ways to build bridges and not walls.

Mark Wood:          Well, of course, it's impossible to talk about Mexico now without talking immigration. I mean, we have, of course, the shutdown of the government over those questions right now. Can you talk about the situation on both sides of the southern border right now?

Tinker Salas:       Well, I think that we have a situation in which we have an invented crisis in which a crisis has been concocted to create the perception that there is a border crisis. Interesting enough, people who really that's being directed at are the people who are the furthers away from the border. The people who live on the border like in El Paso know that El Paso and McAllen are some of the safest cities in the US. People who live in San Diego and others know that's some of the safest cities in the US, yet we're being told they were facing a brown invasion.

Tinker Salas:       It's been referred to as a brown invasion. It has been racialized. It has been ethnicized, and the perception that's being created is that somehow, American values, American views, US culture, society, language is now threatened by the presence of a five-year-old coming across the border with his mother or father because they cannot live in Honduras anymore, because the option of staying is no longer there, because the government in Honduras is an illegitimate government. It was elected by fraud. It has persecuted its own population. The gangs in Honduras are running a significant part of the economy, and the government, and there is repression, there is an employment, and they simply can't live there.

Tinker Salas:       That's the same for El Salvador and Guatemala. It's not a coincidence that countries that saw US intervention and that saw failed US foreign policy are now forced to migrate from their countries to try to find an alternative as they are from Haiti. Here's where I make a particular insight in terms of what I've written about and I talk about that the border has now become internationalized. It's no longer simply a binational border between the US and Mexico. That border is the border between the US and Latin America, the US and the third world, the US and Africa.

Tinker Salas:       In Tijuana today, we have Hondurans, Guatemalans, Salvadorians, Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans. We have Eritreans. We have Somalians. We have others, all looking for the American dream. The US should look at that as something positive. People see the US as a sign of hope. People see the US as an opportunity. I think that, instead, we have used that to promote a certain sense of superiority, of racism, of rejection of the other to try to define a political agenda by scapegoating certain sets of people. There is a social cost to it. There's a human cost to it.

Tinker Salas:       What Central Americans are facing today is a humanitarian crisis, not a border crisis. What Tijuana is facing, what Nogales is facing, what Ciudad Juárez is facing, what Matamoros is facing is a humanitarian crisis, the likes of which we've not seen before. People have walked thousands of miles to try to improve their life and improve their conditions, and what they confront then is be scapegoated.

Mark Wood:          It's largely caused by blocking the asylum seekers and forcing them to stay.

Tinker Salas:       There's an effort try to have Mexico become the repository for asylum seekers because the US claims that its system is overrun. The reality is that there is profits being made by asylum seekers in private prisons, and in private operations that take place all along the border. They have been the largest beneficiaries of the human misery and the asylum seekers. I interviewed a Haitian who told me he requested asylum. He was detained and a center of attention in California for several months, for three months, then sent to one in Arizona, then sent to one in Texas, then sent to one in Florida before being deported. For an entire year, someone was making money on his labor, on his stay there, and in the end, he was deported. Again, those are the private prisons, and the private prison network that is benefiting tremendously from a humanitarian crisis.

Patty Vest:         Let's stay at the border and pivot a little bit to your classes. You said you take trips every month, and you took some of your students last year. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience? What was the goal of that trip?

Tinker Salas:       I've always taught a course called the US-Mexican border since I came here to Pomona College, since my first book was actually Under the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border. The border always fascinated me as a site of that kind of interaction between two countries, two peoples, and now, more than two peoples, but dozens of different communities and cultures. We've taken the students to the border.

Tinker Salas:       This time, I co-taught the course with my colleague April Mayes, and we added a different dimension to it because she was keenly interested in the Haitian community that was now seeking refuge in Tijuana. These are Haitian individuals who left their country as a result of the earthquake in Haiti, sought employment in Brazil because Brazil was hiring for the Olympics and the World Cup. They had gone to Brazil to work in construction projects. Once those projects culminated, they were left unemployed. Many of them began the trek from Brazil by foot across Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, the straits of Darien, all the way through Central America, walking through Mexico to reach Tijuana, hoping to apply for asylum in the US.

Tinker Salas:       Professor Mayes and I had gone to Tijuana several times and documented many of those cases, had gone to the refugee centers, had gone to the asylum centers, and we decided to recast the class as the US-Mexican border with the focus on asylum seekers, with the focus on individuals who were trying to improve their lives. We included the Haitians as well as the indigenous Mexicans because the borders are often a refuge for indigenous Mexicans fleeing Guerrero, Chiapas, Oaxaca where they face racism and they face marginalization and discrimination. We expanded the class to include the experience of all these asylum seekers and these undocumented individuals. We've planned it for a particular day. Lo and behold, that was the same day that Donald Trump decided to go to the border.

Patty Vest:         That's right. That's right.

Tinker Salas:       He went to look at the prototypes that have been built. While I was there, I got a phone call from Univision, the television channel 34 in Los Angeles KMEX and several other stations. I asked the students if they were interested in being interviewed. We happened to be the only delegations of students that were on the Mexican side while Donald Trump was on the US side, literally separated by the wall.

Tinker Salas:       We could see where they were. We could see where we were. A lot of our students were ... I was interviewed. They were interviewed. They were interviewed by Televisa, the Central Mexican television news company, by Univision. I think, for the students, it was a great experience because they were able to see the wall and the border from the US side, but then we has also organized a trip on the Mexican side where we ran the course of the actual wall. They can see the wall existed, the barriers existed, and they can see the impact that those had. They were fortunate to see at the same time as Donald Trump was on the other side

Mark Wood:          Now, you were also an observer during the recent elections in Mexico. Can you tell us about that experience, and also a little bit about the new Mexican president?

Tinker Salas:       Yeah. In July, I was a part of a group of academics that were invited to become observers. It was a very interesting experience because, again, this would've been the third time that Andrés Manuel López Obrador was running for president, the first time as the head of a party called MORENA, National Regeneration Party. In the past, there had been very obvious cases of corruption, vote buying, vote influencing, and there was the fear that that might happen again.

Tinker Salas:       The PRI, the party in power, the party of the Institutionalized Revolution still had tremendous amount of resources, access to funds. There was a fear that they would resort to the same kind of vote buying and corruption. What became very obvious was that, this time, people's indignation with what happened trumped any kind of fear, not the PRI or the PAN could try to promote. There was huge turnouts everywhere we went. We were assigned a district with eight different polling stations, and we were moving from place to place.

Tinker Salas:       The first Saturday, we went and actually did an inspection of all the voting booths and all the voting places, so that Sunday we'd be ready. I was accompanied by Professor Victor Silverman as well in this process. We did a tour, and then we were there when they opened the ballot. We were there when they checked the credentials. We were there able to validate that the process was happening. We were able to also validate that members of a particular party, the PRD, the Party of the Democratic Revolution, were trying to vote by. They had put up their offices across from the polling stations. People could actually pass by and pick up a bag of food and groceries on their way out of voting.

Tinker Salas:       We're able to document that, photograph that, get media attention on that, call the police on that so that we're trying to do our part to ensure that there were free and fair elections. Then we actually stayed at a particular voting booth and helped count the votes, observed while the delegates there counted the election, and it was obvious that Andrés Manuel López Obrador won by the largest of margins and that the popular will was for dramatic political change. After all, this was a person who was running an agenda to regenerate, to renovate Mexico, to tackle corruption, to break apart the old power mafias that had govern Mexico, and to redirect it towards the sectors that been most marginalized.

Tinker Salas:       After all, 53 million Mexicans live in poverty, and that's a tremendous number. Now, we see the beginnings of that change with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the efforts to prosecute those individuals who are involved in the theft of gasoline and the theft of petroleum products as we saw, unfortunately, recently, with the massive explosion in the state of Hidalgo. Now, that's the consequence of how this process of corruption has been ongoing under multiple presidencies, costing the government over $3 billion a year in just stolen petroleum products.

Tinker Salas:       Again, it's very important not to blame the individuals who were in the actual process and who suffered the consequences of explosions, but actually, to look at the mafias of power that are behind the theft of gasoline, to look at the white collar criminals who promote it and who have benefiting from it in the unions, in the political parties, and in the power structure in Mexico from quite some time.

Patty Vest:         Let's talk about a bit about your career as a historian. Can you trace back to the point where you're like, "This is what I want to do, this is what I want to study."?

Tinker Salas:       It was fits and starts. I won't say that I ... I had a very good instructor. My mentor was one of the only Mexican-American Mexican history professors in the country, Ramón Eduardo Ruiz. I pay homage to him. He was a World War 2 veteran, a pilot who helped build up the history department at UCSD in San Diego and was my mentor. He was my teacher in undergraduate, and then he was my teacher as a graduate student with a 10-year hiatus, 12-year hiatus.

Tinker Salas:       In that sense, in seeing his passion, and in seeing his ability to connect with students, and to understand the role that history plays in a modern society, and how there is an official story that we all are told and we all are part of, and then there is the other history, the history of the people who actually are the makers of that history, the peasants, the women, the workers who construct societies and who participate in societies.

Tinker Salas:       I always felt that that other history wasn't being told and that that history needed to be told. I have Bertolt Brecht's poem on my door. It says the president built this, and where were the workers? The generals built this and where were the soldiers? I'm paraphrasing, obviously, but it was a desire to see that other history being told. As I had good professors, I also had professors who repeated that old history. I remember being told by a professor, a very famous Western historian, Mexicans contributed nothing to the history of the southwest, and actually being taken aback because I knew otherwise.

Tinker Salas:       Remember, I'm studying history at a time in which there was a war in Vietnam in which there was an active civil rights movement, women's movement, gay movement in the US, so that I'm studying history as a live participant in the process of social change at the same time that I'm studying history and trying to make sense of the history I'm in with the history that I'm seeing in my classroom. As a young Latino student int he US during that time period, one which identified with the Chicano student movement and was a part of the Chicano student movement, I saw history as a vehicle to rewrite that history that had been omitted.

Mark Wood:          Was that since that there was a misunderstanding or a misinterpretation of Latin American history, the importance of Latin American contributions part of what made you decide to turn your focus back on your own origins, back on Latin America?

Tinker Salas:       There was an erasure and omission. There was a conscience erasure and omission in which that history had been erased. It had been simply looked upon, they were the workers. They were the day workers. They were the pickers. They were the cultural workers and not the actual participants in this process of change. I didn't set out to do history as a process of political change. I love history as a topic. I like to be able to recount the story based upon archival evidence and based upon the historical record, no based upon ideas and suppositions, but based upon ... Because I am an archive-driven historian who spends countless hours in archives doing research to be able to write that history.

Tinker Salas:       I find those voices. They're there. When they're not, it speaks volumes as well because when you see that they're being excluded, you know that there's a narrative that's clearly being omitted. For example, my first book on Sonora and the border, I found it very interesting to go into jails and criminal archives and see what was being classified as "deviant behavior," right? Actually, cussing a foreigner was classified as deviant behavior and you could be arrested, [foreign language 00:47:41].

Tinker Salas:       It tells you an awful lot about the social system and how it's being constructed when you find something like that, or when you're doing research and you find that the American general, Mr. Maxwell says, "The only country I needed was Venezuela." That gives you a whole other perspective on how Venezuela is being constructed because, in my current book that I'm working on now, I'm actually looking at that periods from the '40s to the '50s and that process by which the US engage in nation building in Venezuela?

Patty Vest:         When did you start studying Venezuela? You said as a graduate student, really, you think you should focus on geopolitical powers. When did you start looking at Venezuela as a historian?

Tinker Salas:       I waited until I got tenure. I followed the advice of my advisor, and clearly, in the back of my mind, and Pomona was very helpful in that because in the transition from a large research public university to a liberal arts college. I had much more freedom to be able to develop my own research, and while never abandoning Mexico, while still teaching a course on Mexico on a regular basis, I was able to begin to develop my own interest in Venezuela, to write a book like The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela, to write a book about, an edited book with another colleague about the election of Hugo Chávez and what that meant in the context of Venezuela, or to write book about, a general history of Venezuela, what person should know. By the way, that's an Oxford title, not my title, so that-

Patty Vest:         What was your title?

Tinker Salas:       The series is called What Everyone Needs to Know. There's one for China, for Cuba, for Venezuela, for fracking, for multiple topics, so that's part of a series that they have.

Mark Wood:          Tell us a little more about your research, how you go about your research. You mentioned that you are archives-focused, but I get that you don't spend a lot of time in libraries, necessarily. It's out in the field, looking for other kinds of information.

Tinker Salas:       Well, I do. Not libraries per se. Since I'm on Sabbatical right now, I just finished a three-month stay in archives. I was in the US National Archives in College Park, Maryland for a period of time, going through diplomatic documents, going through military attache reporters, going through something I found which very few people have ever studied which is the role, for example, of the FBI in Latin America. During World War 2, the FBI had the secret intelligence, the special intelligence service, which was precursor to the CIA, which operated in every Latin American country.

Tinker Salas:       I was fortunate enough to find the actual personal statements from all the former agents. Here's how the work of a historian works because I would find ... I wouldn't find the names of the agents. Then it occurred to me, "Well, he must've passed away. Let me try obituaries." I began looking at obituaries, and the families were all forthcoming in the obituaries. Thomas so-and-so worked for the FBI in Venezuela during World War 2. Having the name, now I had the name, no I could begin tracing that person.

Tinker Salas:       In the end, I was able to put together a list of all 25 agents that were in Venezuela by relying on obituaries, and then finding the FBI retiree association because when I did the work in Venezuela and oil, I attended meetings of the federal company New Jersey retiree's association and I interview them because, you're right, I don't want to just look at documents. I want to talk to people as well. I want to get, where possible.

Tinker Salas:       Oral histories are a fundamentally important issue in the construction of an account, of understanding, given that they, with time, they could be refracted, over time, they could've changed. You account for all that, but the oral voice, the personal voice is essential component to it, and it allows you to include what's not in the archive. Again, using multiple approaches and sources, you're able to reconstruct a topic.

Tinker Salas:       Then I also spent time looking at how American academics looked at Venezuela. In going into the personal archives of several academics at Rutgers in New Jersey, Robert Alexander, for instance, who had developed a very close relationship with the political forces in Venezuela. He was very prolific, but he also kept a very intensive record, which tells me, again, that kind of relationship. It was objective. He was a promoter of a certain model in Venezuela. It was his intent to promote that model. In essence, he became a propagandist.

Mark Wood:          Yeah.

Tinker Salas:       It allows me other insights, and then I included Frances Grant, a woman who was also a central figure in promoting the Venezuelan model. Then I spent time looking in the AFL-CIO archives. Here's where a student, Tascha Shahriari had done research with work with me, and he did research along with me in those archives and was able to produce a very important thesis. We shared those archives and he did a fantastic thesis in history last year on the role of the AFL-CIO in Venezuela. Again, we shared with students as well, so we can do that kind of building that research and building that research base.

Patty Vest:         That case you just mentioned is a perfect segue into how do you involve your students in your research? What are other cases or other was you involve them?

Tinker Salas:       Well, there are plenty of sources here in Pomona College and the Claremont Colleges. For years, I tried to get students interested in José María Maytorena was a Villista governor of Sonora. His son went to the Claremont Colleges and donated the archive. We have an archive at the Claremont Libraries that includes letters from Pancho Villa, from Emiliano Zapata, from whole cadre, a coterie of Mexican revolutionary leaders.

Tinker Salas:       One of the students, [Aldor Kisa 00:54:00] wrote his thesis on that topic. I had a graduate student because we also have the documents of the San Gabriel mission, the marriage records of the San Gabriel Mission, which allowed you to trace ethnicity, gender. I had a graduate student work on those records. He was able to do his masters and finish his PhD by using those records. There are multiple ways that can happen as long as they're interested that, for which we have sources in the Claremont Colleges.

Patty Vest:         That helps.

Tinker Salas:       Yes.

Mark Wood:          You're also quoted quite a bit in the media about Latin America issues. Do you see work as a public intellectual, as a part of your mission as a historian?

Tinker Salas:       I don't know if it was submission, but I think it's important to be able to provide a different perspective on how Latin America is viewed. There are so much misinformation about Latin America. A lot of it is based on the lack of knowledge. A lot of it's based on stereotypes and prejudice. I think it's an important role where possible to play a role in trying to clarify the records, to make sure that the materials being presented, that the information being presented, it reflects accurately the experience of the country or the issue. The other role I play sometimes is for the Spanish language media. Again, there's absence of critical reflection and voices, sometimes, in Spanish language media. I play that role sometimes in both arenas so that either radio, television, or print. I played that role several times.

Patty Vest:         You mentioned you're working on a book. Can you tell us more about that?

Tinker Salas:       The book is looking ... As I said, the book starts with the research I did for the previous book, Enduring Legacy. It starts because my hometown of Caripito was a town of 5,000 people in Eastern Venezuela. It had a refinery. As I'm looking through the archives, I find the CEO report on the union meeting in that town. Then a year later, I find the CIA report on the union meeting in that town. Then I find the Office of Military Intelligence has another report on the Union meeting that town.

Tinker Salas:       Then I find that the office of naval intelligence had report on that town, then I find the state department had a report like that. I said, "Wait a minute. How many people does it take to have intelligence on a town of 5,000 people?" It became obvious that the US had created a security apparatus, a significant security apparatus to protect this investment in oil and Venezuela. After all, the Creole Petroleum Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of standard oil.

Tinker Salas:       Was the wealthiest contributor to the standard oil offers. It's the most important foreign investment, and what I came to realize as I peel back the multiple layers, was it the US, security apparatus? Then just inc ole include the military. It also included a cultural component, a social component. What I essentially began calling a nation-building component to protect its investment in Venezuela and to assure that, again, Venezuela would become and would remain the country in Latin America that allowed, freely allowed, foreign investment and the repatriation of prophets back to the US.

Tinker Salas:       During these important periods of the World War 2, the Cold War, and then, essentially, the US engaged in nation building of Venezuela. As I peeled again the layers, I found economic missions, educational missions, example, tax missions, custom missions, just about every group that you could imagine would go to Venezuela and attempt to remake Venezuela and its government in the US image in ways that I had not thought about.

Tinker Salas:       Then I found that academic world on the same thing, particularly Robert Alexander, Frances Grant, and a series of other individuals for which Venezuela became their most important work. Together then, it gave me an inside into how this process of securing their investments, of securing Venezuela, in fact, created a country that may help explain what that Venezuela was in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, and what the challenges it faces today.

Mark Wood:          Finally, let's talk about the future. What's next for Venezuela? Are you optimistic or pessimistic?

Patty Vest:         Did you bring your magic ball?

Mark Wood:          Yeah.

Patty Vest:         Ball.

Tinker Salas:       I'll play the lotto tonight too. I can only hope that cooler heads prevail, that there's an effort to find common ground and a mechanism by which people are willing to recognize the existence of the other, the presence of the other, and that the political system can be cleansed so that that process of recognizing the other moves forward, and would begin to tackle the most serious problems that Venezuela faces from economic dependency to crime, corruption, inequality.

Tinker Salas:       I don't think that there's ... Venezuela has changed. We're not going back to a pre-1998 period. Venezuela has to be remade in the image of what it is today and remade from the perspective of how to resolve the problems it faces today. There is no going back, and central to that has to be how to address inequality, poverty that has been a constant companion of Venezuela even since oil was found.

Patty Vest:         How about Mexico? Right after the elections, you said you were optimistic for the first time in a long time. Are you still-

Tinker Salas:       I remain optimistic.

Patty Vest:         Yeah?

Tinker Salas:       I remain optimistic. I think that challenges that Obrador, and not just Obrador, but that Mexico faces are still enormous. The fight against the gas mafias known in Mexico as huachicoleros only begins to underscore the severity of the problem and the depth of the problem that Mexico confronts. We're talking about an institutionalized political corruption that permeates multiple sectors of society, multiples sectors of economy, and must be gradually disarticulated if we're able to open up Mexico so that we're able to see a country where poverty can drop, violence can drop, and that, in essence, will the best thing that can be done to reduce immigration as well.

Mark Wood:          Well, on that note, we're going to wrap this out. Our thanks to Professor Miguel Tinker Salas for talking with us about his personal and academic journey through the political evolution of Latin America. Thanks, Miguel.

Tinker Salas:       Thank you. Thank you.

Patty Vest:         To all who've stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College, until next time.