Inlandia Institute to honor late UCR professor Eluid Martínez
Summer sun shifts to autumn. We move toward the moon as the wind brings us the chills. We rake the yellowed leaves. We put on warmer clothes. We look back on the year passed. Many shiver from the losses the year has brought. If someone doesn’t shiver this year, some year, he/she, unfortunately, will. Death — the only thing certain as we spiral around this mortal coil.
Eluid Martínez, professor emeritus of creative writing at UC Riverside, died this year at age 85. I did not know him, but learned of his work through Inlandia, which published his autobiographical short fiction collection, “GüeroGüero: The White Mexican and Other Published and Unpublished Stories,” in 2021. I wanted to know more about him so I looked him up, read his words; those black ink marks we writers leave behind like fingerprints. I learned.
Martínez was born in 1935 in Pflugerville, Texas, a town now known for its colossal water parks, but not then. The first of six children, Martínez grew up speaking Spanish. Martínez’s language was ridiculed when he entered U.S. public school. He recounts his childhood experience in “Writer’s Perspective on Multiple Ancestries: Essays on Race and Ethnicity”: “American teachers were washing children’s mouths for speaking Spanish. Teachers were making children write on the board fifty or a hundred times that they would not speak Spanish on school premises.”
Martínez would remember this harassment; however, he was not a man who could be hindered. He writes, “I spoke only Spanish when I started school in first grade. Other Mexican children already spoke English and Spanish, and I am confident that their doing so helped me a great deal. In my case, one morning it seems, I woke up and I could speak English and Spanish. I do not remember learning English, but I remember that in first grade at Bickler Elementary School, the teacher had us reading Jack and Jill books and nursery rhymes, aloud.”
Spanish, however, remained an integral part of his educational journey.
“My father, a man with a superb thirdgrade education at a village school in Mexico, was my first great teacher. When I was eight years old, he began to teach me how to read and write Spanish from the Spanish language newspaper La Prensa de San Antonio. He would bring me books in both languages.”
Renee Gurley
Eliud Martínez was a professor emeritus of comparative literature and creative writing at UC Riverside. He died this year at the age of 85.
A talented artist, Martínez earned a bachelor’s degree in painting art from the University of
Texas, Austin and completed graduate work in art at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. However, he walked away from teaching art in academia in 1963 after a stint at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne to explore the bohemian lifestyle in Chicago and New York. This path led to love when he met Elisse Weintraub. They wed and moved to Ohio where Eluid earned a Ph.D. in 1972. The newlyweds moved west when he accepted a professorship in comparative literature and languages at UC Riverside the same year.
He continued his art and writing for the rest of his career, but just as important to him, he made a lasting impact on UCR’s educational requirements by introducing the first multi-ethnic literature course and courses around identity and ancestry that became graduation requirements.
Martínez remained “fascinated by cemeteries and by the quiet, unrecorded lives of ordinary people that are factually circumscribed by dates of birth and death. What sorrows and tragedy did they know in their lives, what joys and satisfaction?”
Eluid Martínez, now the wind that brings us the chill as we twirl into its autumn’s spin. A time of year when many people create ofrendas for the ones who’d passed that year, placing the Cempasúchil, calacas and calaveras on the altar with grief, with care.
Beginning Nov. 1, the eve of Dia de Los Muertos, Inlandia Institute will honor Eluid Martínez’s legacy by accepting submissions for the Eliud Martínez Prize, a national contest whose eligibility is limited to writers who identify as Hispanic, Latino/a/x, and/or Chicana/o/x who have not yet published a first book of prose.
Somewhere on the other side, Martinez raises a glass in the chilled air and whispers to us, ¡Hablar!