A Present From Mexico’s Past

RANCHO SANTA FE — The morning is cool, California autumn, with low-slung clouds trailing veils of gray mist as they drift inland from the Pacific. Inside Ramon Eduardo Ruiz’s house, a single-story adobe that opens L-shaped onto a manicured garden, the dawn chill clings stubbornly, and the crisp air shatters easily under his words.

“I don’t believe signing welfare reform was good for the poor,” Ruiz says, sitting in a comfortable leather chair in his study, clay tiles underfoot and the dark walls lined with books. “Blockading Cuba is not a good thing for the Cuban people. I’ve been to Cuba many times and always believed in what they are trying to do.”

Ruiz has, as he freely admits, many opinions. Strong opinions. While even his critics concede that his ideas are formidable, well-reasoned and difficult to rebut, most of Ruiz’s thoughts run contrary to the moderate-conservative mores dominating current cultural and political debate.

Which means he has had trouble getting those views heard.

That could change this week. On Thursday, Ruiz will be among nine Americans receiving the National Humanities Medal at the White House. Among his peers for this day are Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Ruiz, 77, has been writing and teaching about Latin America--mostly Mexican history--for more than 40 years. Highly regarded in his field, he’s invisible to most of America. A quick check of bookshelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble outlets found one copy of his newest book, “On the Rim of Mexico: Encounters of the Rich and Poor” (Westview Press), a critical look at life on the south side of the border since NAFTA. There were none of the 11 previous books he has written or edited.

Ruiz doesn’t take it personally. He learned long ago that he’s exploring a history that finds few enthusiasts north of the border, despite the inherent drama of bloody conquests and revolts, and what he sees as Mexico’s present status as an economic colony of American state capitalism.

Latin American history is ignored for myriad reasons, believes Ruiz, who was born and raised in the La Jolla area, the American son of Mexican immigrants. One of the factors is American hubris, a national egoism that disregards all histories but a European-derived one. Another factor is the politics of color, “and it’s a mistake to ignore it,” he says.

And then there’s the American citizenry itself, more interested in the personal and the present than the communal past.

“Americans are just not historically oriented,” Ruiz says. “It’s a new country, an immigrant nation, most of them coming after the late 19th century. History doesn’t play a very large role.”

Work Shed Light on Mexican Revolution

Yet pursuit of history, the desire to put the present into context, has played a dominant role in Ruiz’s life. And in turn, his work has been a critical factor in helping define the debate over the nature of the Mexican Revolution. It’s a complicated history, one that is prone--like most histories of revolutions--to interpretations of convenience.

For leftists, the Mexican Revolution was the first socialist uprising of the century, presaging the Bolsheviks in Russia, Mao in China and Castro in Cuba. Other historians, though, argue the opposite, that the Mexican revolt was actually the last of the bourgeois revolutions--like the French Revolution--in which the middle class overthrew the aristocracy.

Ruiz, though, stood the debate on its ear by arguing in his “The Great Rebellion” that, despite all the bloodshed and turmoil, the Mexican revolt wasn’t a social revolution at all, since nothing really changed except who controlled the apparatuses of society. To paraphrase an old rock ‘n’ roll song, the old boss was the same as the new boss.

“His thesis was that it was just a great explosion of anger,” says Abdiel Onate, associate professor of history at San Francisco State, who uses some of Ruiz’s books to teach Mexican history. “Mexico was already a capitalist society before the revolution, and it produced a regime that consolidated capitalist development afterward.

“It was very well-received, not so much because people agreed with his thesis but because the work was of very high quality. Academically, it was very solidly researched and well-organized. It was a persuasive argument that he was presenting . . . that makes available a wide range of facts and information.”

‘Intuitive Mind, Supportive Nature’

Behind Ruiz’s academic rigor, says Ray Sadler, chair of the history department at New Mexico State University, stands a sharp, intuitive mind and a supportive, genteel nature.

“He’s a thoughtful historian,” says Sadler, a former contributor to the conservative National Observer, and who often disagrees with Ruiz’s perspective. “His friends are legion in this business. This is a case where everybody is not going to be jealous behind his back. His friends will all be pleased that somebody got [the medal] who really deserved it.”

Ruiz himself is pleased, for reasons both general and personal. A national honor can’t help but direct attention to the work he has done--and, by extension, to Latin American history overall. And it puts a stamp on personal satisfaction already fed by the knowledge that his books--including his award-winning narrative history of Mexico, “Triumphs and Tragedy” (Norton, 1992)--are used as college history texts.

“I’m very flattered,” says Ruiz, a slender man with graying hair who runs five miles a day. “Everybody wants to be known for doing something well, particularly if it’s something that you think that you do well.”

Ruiz was drawn to history through the influence of his father, a member of the Mexican Navy who left the service and his native country when the old regime collapsed during the revolution. He settled with his family near La Jolla and became a nurseryman.

Ruiz writes books in English but has lectured and written essays in Spanish. His early school education was supplemented by informal evening classes with his father using Mexican textbooks to instruct him and his four brothers and sisters.

“My father was a militant nationalist,” says Ruiz, who speaks in a deep, measured voice. “He would talk about the heroes of Mexico, the food of Mexico, the character of Mexico and the folklore of Mexico. We were saturated with tales of Mexico, the values, and pride in our Mexican heritage.”

Theatrical Professor Ignited His Interest

Ruiz himself served in World War II as an Army pilot in the Pacific and afterward entered San Diego State, where he encountered a history professor prone to the kinds of flamboyant theatrics that can bring the past to life. He disagreed with the professor’s perspectives on history but was taken with his ability to make it relevant.

“That really turned me on to history,” Ruiz says. “It fit right in with what my mother and father inculcated in me. I wanted to learn more about myself, through history. To survive, you’ve got to be proud of yourself, of your heritage, where you came from and what you represent. There’s no better discipline than history for that.”

Ruiz went on to earn a doctorate in history from UC Berkeley and taught at universities in the U.S. and Mexico before settling at UC San Diego at La Jolla around 1970.

Ruiz and his wife, Natalia, a retired high school foreign-languages teacher, bought a three-acre parcel about six miles inland from Solana Beach in 1970. They later had the house built, and as their two daughters grew up they kept horses on the lot. One daughter is assistant to the mayor of Albuquerque; the other is a poet and anthropologist teaching at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City.

Despite Ruiz’s standing as a historian, he views himself more as a writer, a point of pride that plays out in the stylized voice of his books. He dislikes the growing academic specialization of the field, in which historians write styleless books debating minor details and applying systems as templates, all for the consumption of other historians.

“I’m a different kind of historian,” Ruiz says, laying some of the differences to a generational divide. “We want to write narrative histories but also interpretive. I want to put together a history that’s readable. I have opinions, and I don’t try to hide them, but I also try to write for a larger public. I’m not writing for specialists. History is in the humanities, but it’s also an art. The great historians were also great writers.”

Ruiz’s passion for history and the stories of the past are only part of his inheritance from his father. The son also shares the father’s love of the land. Ruiz’s house stands amid a maze of gravel-bedded gardens, with hummingbirds darting among the bottle brush plants and birds of paradise Ruiz planted and maintains after he tired of mowing and watering the lawn.

He does most of the work himself, shuttling materials back and forth in a pickup truck, the professor as campesino. The work helps him think, helps feed his sense of social conscience. His father, he says, was dark-complexioned and from a poor family in Sinaloa. His mother, light-skinned and descended from Spanish Basques, came from a wealthy ranching family in Chihuahua.

He sees in those two threads of influence the heart of his own intellectual outlook.

“There’s a tremendous advantage in growing up as a Mexican in this country,” Ruiz says, smiling slightly as he recognizes the irony. “If you’re not part of the mainstream in this country, you’re ostracized, you know bigotry and prejudice. You’re not apt to accept the main theology of the majority, that we’re a gentle people, that we care about others, that we’re idealists. You know that that is not entirely true.

“You begin to examine carefully what this country is all about. You can see the warts along with the attributes. You can be more objective and original in your thinking and not get sucked into the concept that the American way of life is the best way of life.”