Assistant Professor of Spanish Roberto Castillo-Sandoval
By Steve Manning `96

When Roberto Castillo-Sandoval matriculated at Kenyon College in 1979, he was presented with several opportunities, the foremost being the freedom to study sociology. His previous experience in higher education had been at the Universidad Católica de Chile, where the repressive Pinochet regime had banned sociology along with a host of other disciplines. In Chile, he had studied English and American Literature and was working on a degree in teaching English as a foreign language. He also was involved in student resistance groups and underground political parties. His choice to come to the United States was not entirely his own, nor was it fueled by a burning desire to study sociology.

After General Augusto Pinochet and his military junta took control of Chile in 1973, one of the first targets of his totalitarian machine was the nation's university system. Subjects were banned; professors were either forced to resign, conform, or leave the country, and were replaced by sympathizers to the regime. "It was a devastating blow to the university system in Chile," recalls Castillo-Sandoval, "and to this day it is still felt." When he entered college in 1977, the resistance movement was still in its infancy. "At the time when I got involved there were very few students in the movement. For me it wasn't a choice." After a couple stints in jail, the government forced Castillo-Sandoval to leave Chile in 1979, and with the help of an American professor at the Universidad Católica, he enrolled at Kenyon.

He only really has been able to return to Chile since 1988, after Pinochet was democratically ousted in a plebicscite he never expected to lose. "Whenever I went back I was harassed at the airport, in the street. Only after `88 have I been able to return and be left in peace." However, Chile has remained in the forefront for Castillo-Sandoval, as his research and activities illustrate. After graduating from Kenyon in 1982, he was awarded a Watson Fellowship and spent the following year traveling throughout Europe and Latin America studying Chilean exile groups. He returned to the U.S. after his fellowship and enrolled in a Latin American Studies program at Vanderbilt. A class on Colonial Latin American Literature taught by the renowned scholar Enrique Pupo-Walker, convinced him that literature was his true calling. "I came back to literature after this long engagement with the social sciences, which I still love, but my true vocation has always been literature," he states. Castillo-Sandoval went on to complete his Ph.D. at Harvard University, and also taught, first as a teaching fellow and later as an instructor. One of the highlights of his time at Harvard was studying with and working as a teaching fellow under the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes. In the summer of 1991, he joined the faculty at Haverford.

Castillo-Sandoval is working hard at his self-proclaimed vocation. His latest work is, in his own words, "a critical examination of the notion of national identity in Chile and Latin America, in relation to how the native populations have been used as a prop for defining national character." His primary sources in this venture are `captive narratives', which he described as the personal histories of Spaniards who were captured by Indians and adopted their culture. When these captives returned to Spanish-held territory, they found they couldn't express any indigenous traits within the dominant Spanish culture, which was reluctant to accept native traditions. The narratives illustrate how these people dealt with this dilemma and provide a true picture of the blending of Spanish and indigenous culture.

Castillo-Sandoval has discovered that "there is an ongoing process of revamping the same old foundational myths in Chile, as in the rest of Latin America, with the consequence that we are always looking at a reflection that is very distorted and hinders any chance for true cultural diversity to flourish. The real indigenous people are left aside because they are not Chilean, or Mexican, or Argentinean enough." At the same time, the indigenous past is crucial to the official national ideologies. "In Chile, the final conquest of the native people was done after independence in the late 19th century by the Chilean army," Castillo-Sandoval states, allowing the historian in him to emerge, "So the army has always carried the badge of honor of having conquered the national territory. At the same time, they name their regiments, garrisons, ships and planes with Indian names." This was crucial to the Pinochet military regime, which used false national identity to legitimize itself. Castillo-Sandoval sums up this method of legitimization, asserting, "you extract from the representation of indigenous people what is convenient for you ideologically; you don the disguise of the Indians as true patriots, and leave aside the real indigenous people."

In addition to his research, Castillo-Sandoval has found the time to try his hand at fiction writing; he has recently submitted the manuscript for his first novel to publishers. Muriendo por la dulce patria mía (Dying For My Precious Homeland) is based on the real story of a boxer from Chile, Arturo Godoy who went to the U.S. twice in 1940 to fight the legendary Joe Louis. His first match went the full fifteen rounds, only because the Chilean spent most of the time avoiding any contact with Louis. However the second match revealed his pugilistic shortcomings, as Louis defeated him in a bloody, one-sided encounter. He was hailed as a hero in Chile, despite the defeat, and the Chileans were led to believe that he would have been world champion had it not been for circumstances beyond his control. Castillo-Sandoval remarks that this is a trend, saying, "In Chile we have a tendency to turn defeat and failure into glorious achievement." Castillo-Sandoval began the work as a biography of Godoy, but eventually turned it into a novel in which the narrator gets caught up in researching the life of Godoy and what it means to the writer as a Chilean 50 years later.

In the classroom Castillo-Sandoval has distinguished himself as a popular Spanish and Latin American Studies professor. For him teaching a language is a work in progress, "I realize the more I do it, the more it is a craft and an art. You always have to find the balance between going too hard on people and discouraging them, or being too easy and completely under challenging students." In addition to Spanish, Castillo-Sandoval is the head of the Latin American Studies program, which explores the culture, literature, and history of the region. This semester he is teaching a course titled `Just Wars and Utopias' which reflects much of his current research. He also has taught a class that explored Latin American popular culture. The syllabus focused on different genre, including music, comics, soap operas, and folk traditions to name a few.

Castillo-Sandoval is also joining the new technological wave that is revolutionizing higher education; the internet. This past summer he was one of Haverford's representatives at technology workshops held at Middlebury College, where he learned how to incorporate computer technology and other forms of multimedia into his courses. He designed and maintains the Spanish Department's home page, and the students in his Latin American pop culture class developed web pages based on the class.

A glance at Castillo-Sandoval's office gives away his interest in pop culture. On the floor lies an open guitar case, a strange item amongst the books and papers of an academic. Castillo-Sandoval plays guitar, tiple, percussion, and provides a tenor voice to Páramo, a band that specializes in music of the Andean region and the Latin American tradition called Nueva Canción. A movement that began in the 1960s, Nueva Canción draws on folk traditions throughout Latin America, combining native and European instruments. The band began playing together when Castillo-Sandoval was a graduate student at Harvard, and has migrated south to Philadelphia as its members moved to the region. Páramo plays several times each semester mostly at universities and colleges and has performed most recently at Villanova University. Castillo-Sandoval even incorporates his music into his classes, occasionally bringing his guitar along with him to give his students a taste of Latin American music.

Although he is still working dilligently on his current book, Castillo-Sandoval already has a topic for his next treatise. He plans to study Latin Americans of African descent, pointing out that people still fail to recognize that Latin American countries, such as Mexico and Argentina, were home to large slave populations that seemed to "vanish" from their national consciousness after the colonial peroid. In the meantime, the industrious professor keeps himself busy, either surrounded by a stack of books at his computer, in front of the class, or on stage.