Writing 50 Years (mas o menos) Amongst the Gringos

Writing 50 Years (más o menos) Amongst the Gringos is a curated collection of 91 separate writings that includes journalistic columns and articles, essays, short stories, poems, cantos, huehuetlahtolli, academic work, and excerpts from seven books that span almost 50 years of Dr. Cintli’s life, from 1973-2021. Designed as a multi-and-interdisciplinary reader for  the general public, as well as college/university and high school students in Indigenous/Chicanx/ Ethnic Studies and Journalism/Communications courses, this book includes discussion questions, writing prompts and activities for teachers and students at the end of each decade.

“This masterful, magical, if at times anguishing, compendium guides the reader through a remarkable journey of the highly successful and beloved journalist and university professor, Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodríguez. With its numerous touch points throughout on issues of race, identity, culture, and Indigeneity against the historical backdrop of colonial violence, symbolic and real, it should prove highly accessible and captivating to students, teachers, and diverse audiences associated with the Ethnic Studies Movement today.”

—Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., author, Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. College of Education, University of Texas at Austin.

Roberto Rodríguez – Dr. Cintli – is an emeritus associate professor in the Mexican American Studies Department at the University of Arizona in Tucson where he has taught since 2008. He was born in Mexico and raised in East Los Angeles. He received his Bachelors at UCLA in 1976 and his Masters and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2005 and 2008, respectively. He is a longtime award-winning writer who through the years has written for many publications, including being a nationally syndicated columnist for twelve years (1994-2006), first with Chronicle Features, then with Universal Press Syndicate. His last two books, Our Sacred Maíz is Our Mother: Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas (2014), and Yolqui: A Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World/Testimonios on Violence (2019), were published by the University of Arizona Press. The third book of this trilogy, Smiling Brown: People the Color of the Earth, is forthcoming. Currently, he writes a bi-monthly column for The Progressive Populist and directs the Raza Killings Database Project. He can be reached at XColumn@gmail.com.