Alberto M. has almost no non-academic friends in the US (not a big surprise). I was like that for many years myself, and thankfully not like that any more. I'ts not that I have a lot of close friends at all, but my general social circle is not mostly academic. It adds an oddness to life to have only academic friends. He blames being an expatriate for that.
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But this is one of the DISEASES of a certain group immigrant Spanish professors. They REFUSE to have any non-academic friends. Is it because they are men and do not know how to make friends?
I've lived abroad before lots. Have never actually moved abroad, but lived abroad. Yes, it's hard to make friends if the language is hard, and you're very involved at the university, and you make a lot of social connections there. I can see how it happens.
BUT. One of the first things I do wherever I go is find out about local hiking groups, also art galleries / studios, also activism. It is not so that I can make friends, but because I am interested in those things. Through them I end up making non academic friends.
Even in Riga, Latvia, where I was just on a week's vacation, I went to a movie at a cinéclub and quickly realized: if I could speak at all and I went here more than once, these people, who are regulars, would start inviting me places. There was also a kind of rock music collective up the street from my hotel. It looked interesting so I googled it and found out that it was a rock venue but also some kind of international social club. Not my exact age group but I saw people my age going in. I could just tell it was not like a bar but like a community center or something, where you go to get involved in something, and that people make friends.
But then of course, you get involved in the community, and you don't publish as much as Moreiras does, etc. AND I don't know that Moreiras is interested in talking about a great deal besides Hegel and so on, so . . .
He thinks of non-academic Americans as soccer moms and church-goers.
He sure doesn't get out much! Well, if you've only lived in Athens, GA, Madison, WI, Durham, NC and College Station, TX and you isolate with your also-academic spouse, I can see how it would happen. But how can you have an opinion about a place if you know so little of it?
"The truth is that, in the United States, for the most part, there is no street life, no life about town, which for an expat academic, no matter how reluctant, means that there is hardly air outside the air-conditioned institution. The North American rituals of Sunday church, children's soccer, and sports events that are among the few visible social links remain alien to the expatriate..." Then he has a parenthetical about a "neurotic" "radical voluntarism" that is "counterproductive, excessive."
Then he says that since work is everything for such an expat, anything wrong that happens there is "catastrophic and soul destroying." Well, of course it is! All the emotional needs are to be satisfied by one's academic status.
He's describing the Protestant south and the non-urban Midwest. It is true enough but I still insist: join your local kayaking club, and you'll end up with friends.
The voluntarism is civic participation, right, this is what he means?
Also, does he realize how quiet most of Latin America is? *Brazil* has a lack of street life, not to mention smaller and poorer countries. You HAVE TO join an art cooperative, some sort of interest group, and there you will find people who become friends.
Also: Louisiana has no beach. And, as in much of Latin America, most social life is within extended families. This is why those who are not local can be lonely. It is just weird to me how these foreign profs think their problem is being foreign, those from out of state have many of the same problems, states are like countries.
Anyway, now I am reading it obsessively, parts you get read in Amazon samples, which are quite a lot. I've read it before and it's just interesting how much of my life I recognize. Like having had things seem truly desert like 1999-2011. Coming back to life 2013. It's not individual events, these things happened to us all
I'm doing the same, reading all the amazon samples. It is fascinating. I had few non-academic friends until 9 years ago, so I am not being harsh on people like this.
I am not harsh on it to the people, I see the situation, I've just seen how terrible it is for people. I have been the only US friend of various ones who were brought here to grad school by their professor, bringing the problems of academic politics of that country and already imprisoned in those, and then getting stuck in a no speak English situation, dependent for everything on one department and one lab and adding the politics of whatever is happening here. So a disagreement about cooking is a career crisis. I see it with our grad students now.
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