Dr. Carey Latimore moved to San Antonio in 2004 to take a job at the prestigious Trinity University. He teaches classes in the area of African American studies. He is leading the way to create an African American institute in San Antonio to document the past and provide a location for discourse on racial justice issues.

Transcript:

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Justin Hill: Hello and Bienvenidos San Antonio. Welcome to the Alamo Hour, discussing the people, places, and passion that make our city. My name is Justin Hill, a local attorney, a proud San Antonionian, and keeper of chickens and bees. On the Alamo Hour, you'll get to hear from the people that make San Antonio great and unique and the best-kept secret in Texas. We're glad that you're here.

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All right. Welcome to the Alamo Hour. Today's guest is Dr. Carey Latimore. Dr. Latimore is a professor of African American Studies and other classes at Trinity University. He got his PhD from Emory. He's written extensively. He's won many awards. He was recently tapped by the city to share some of his thoughts and some of his research regarding the Alamo Plaza project and some decisions on what to do with some of the surrounding buildings. We've asked Dr. Latimore to be on here. We asked previously to all of the protests in the city and some of the issues that have arisen since then, but the timing couldn't be better. Thank you, Dr. Latimore, for being here today.

Dr. Carey Latimore: Thank you, Justin. It's my honor to be here.

Justin: We had a fantastic conversation before we got to start recording which we should have recorded, but we'll probably recover some of that but--

Dr. Latimore: And long time ago, too, we talked about a month or so ago [crosstalk].

Justin: Yes, for about an hour. It was a great conversation.

Dr. Latimore: And all this other stuff.

Justin: We were introduced through Dr. Lesh, who is your best man in your wedding, and as a friend of the show. I'm not going to kid, he's probably the biggest supporter of what I'm doing here and I can't thank him enough.

Dr. Latimore: Dave is a good man.

Justin: Yes, he is.

Dr. Latimore: I'm sure he's listening to that too.

Justin: He will be listening. It's funny, Dr. Lesh will give me opinions on what to ask and he'll-- I think with you, he was like, "Well, ask him how we met," or-- I can't remember what it was, but he has to be part of everything. You've listened to some of the shows, every show we start with a top 10. I've read some interviews you've done with a newspaper, I've read some interviews you've done with Trinity's Getting to Know a Professor. Basically, anything I could find, I've read, I've watched some videos, so I found a few things I want to talk about.

Dr. Latimore: That sounds scary though.

Justin: Well, the internet has a lot of things out there. Compared to some people, you're fine, you don't have anything that-- There's really not a ton out there.

Dr. Latimore: That's good.

Justin: You academics, y'all's researches and books that cost $10 to $50 a piece so I don't--

Dr. Latimore: You're right. This is true.

Justin: I tried to buy a Lesh book and I don't get the Lesh special even though I know him, so I had to pay- I only bought the one that was $9, I'm not going to lie, I wouldn't buy any of his other books. Were you at his books--?

Dr. Latimore: I was not. I had a class that night.

Justin: It was interesting. It was like a book release party for two books at once or something.

Dr. Latimore: That's how Lesh rolls.

Justin: He did a reading of his book. It was hard to take it seriously, honestly, because I know Lesh socially, I don't know him as an academic. I didn't realize how austere and dry those events were.

Dr. Latimore: Lesh has a very powerful presence too.

Justin: He does?

Dr. Latimore: In the classroom, he is extraordinarily, and I'm not saying anything that he wouldn't agree with, he has an extraordinary presence.

Justin: Yes, I believe that.

Dr. Latimore: There are some students who are afraid of him.

Justin: I believe that.

Dr. Latimore: Of course, then he's very tall and he's got that baseball background. People are not used to having their college professor being a former baseball player and drafted, I think in the first round or something like that. He's a different--

Justin: He's a real deal. I think that's one thing that is always fun with hanging out with him because me and our mutual friend Tim, we just see him as our friends so we don't give him any extra deference. That's hard for him to take for the first 20 minutes. All right, so top 10, we're going to get through some stuff, then we're going to spend some time talking about your areas of research. I want to talk to you about your teaching philosophy. I think that's interesting. I went to law school at Baylor which still employs the Paper Chase style Socratic method. You're up on your feet, it's in your face, and if you don't know you get kicked out of class. It was a very intense environment. Let's start with when and why did you move to San Antonio?

Dr. Latimore: Trinity University was the when and why. I did not know a lot about Trinity before I came here, but when I was at Emory University finishing up my PhD, one of the things that happens in academia is you have these hiring cycles. It's really a year-long process that begins, really at the end of the summer. All of these universities really post their jobs is for history, probably around August or September. There are a couple of different places where we find out who's interested in hiring somebody. I looked at these places and Trinity University was looking for a historian in my area. It was one of the six or seven universities that I applied to.

That happened, and then around October, I think the search theoretically, the application period ended, and in December, they contacted me saying that they were interested in having a future conversation with me at the American Historical Association meeting, which is these all academic fields have these huge meetings and there are thousands of people that will go. For the AHA, it's usually in a very cold environment. When I say cold, I mean, they're going to meet in Chicago, they're going to meet in New York, they're going to meet in DC, and it's going to be the first week of January so you know it's going to be cold.

You're bringing all these people to DC or somewhere, some cold environment, and all of these people looking for jobs, in addition to all the things that they do at the regular meeting. I was just a young kid, I had never done a job interview before. I knew that there were probably about 10 other people that were interviewing for that same position, or 12. They bring you up for a half-hour long meeting. There was a table of about seven faculty members at Trinity there and I was this one guy, surrounded by these faculty members.

Talk about a power dynamic there. I'm sitting there, trying to ask questions right. I was so young, I probably didn't even think about it at that time. They interviewed me. I got called back to a second interview the next day, they said, "We'd like to talk again." I'm like, "Gosh, I guess I'm doing a good job." I came back, they talked to me for about another 45 minutes to an hour, and then they said, "Well, you'll hear from us at some point in time."

In January, a couple of weeks later, I received a call saying, we'd like you to come to San Antonio and talk to us a little bit more. I got on the bus, no, not got on the bus, got a plane, came to San Antonio. Over a two day period, they took me around the university, they talked to me, I had to present my research and other kinds of things. Then I went home, they said, "Well, we'll talk to you later." I get a call, probably three weeks later, offered me the job.

Justin: What a process.

Dr. Latimore: It's a long huge process, not just go and you find out the next day. Everything in academia is long-drawn-out. Getting a PhD is six or seven years, it's long-drawn-out. Getting tenure long and drawn out. We make things seem much longer than they actually need to be, but that's how I ended up in Texas.

Justin: What year was that?

Dr. Latimore: That was in 2004 when I started. Trinity is very similar to my undergrad, the University of Richmond. Small liberal arts, really pays attention to teaching, they care about research, a great university in a great city. Richmond is obviously different from San Antonio, but in many ways, Texas and Virginia, share some commonalities. Both states think that they are the state. We in Virginia [crosstalk]

Justin: I didn't know Virginia had that chip on its shoulder.

Dr. Latimore: The Commonwealth of Virginia. When you are in Virginia, “We have the most presidents from our state,” the history of the state. When you take Virginia history in fourth grade, it is hammered into you, the prominence of Virginia.

Justin: They don't have the Alamo though.

Dr. Latimore: They don't have the Alamo, but we do have aspects of history, confederacy. Into the Revolutionary War was in-- You got Cornwallis' Cave and Colonial Williamsburg and all these aspects of Virginia. I think there's a bit of arrogance to Virginians about who they are and the same thing about Texas. In Virginia, the biggest thing that people want to be is a FFV, which is the First Family of Virginia.

Justin: Oh, geez.

Dr. Latimore: It's almost like, I guess the doors of the Alamo or the-- People trace their history back to--

Justin: People that were at the Alamo.

Dr. Latimore: Exactly, people who were at the Alamo or these other families and major land grant families. These two states share some things in common. Trinity was in a place that was a really good place at that time and still is, very similar to where I felt my university was when I started as an undergrad at the University of Richmond. It was like going home in a sense. San Antonio is a really cool city--

Justin: I love it.

Dr. Latimore: - if you think about it. Trinity was my first choice of universities and I got my first choice. I guess the rest is the rest.

Justin: I don't want you to get it because I don't think I want to know, but what is the title of your dissertation? I always think those are fun to hear.

Dr. Latimore: Always a Minority: Antebellum and Free Blacks in the Civil War Era. I think that was the title of the dissertation [crosstalk].

Justin: That's pretty normal. You hear some that are just off-the-wall.

Dr. Latimore: Always a Minority, then you have the colon and then the rest of them. Every dissertation topic is going to have the little cool thing, and then the explanation after the colon.

Justin: But you know what I'm talking about, some are just absurd.

Dr. Latimore: Mine was only 200 pages. Some of them are much, much, much.

Justin: How many footnotes?

Dr. Latimore: Hundreds, because you have to.

Justin: Yes, of course. What are your main sources of news?

Dr. Latimore: Lots of different things.

Justin: I started asking this because news has become such a hot topic.

Dr. Latimore: For me, it's going to sound cliche, but CNN is a-- For me, I always go through CNN. Then I do, in an odd way, I do searches. I'm interested in different subjects and so I do subject searches and find what's there and look at maybe the historian in me looks at the provenance and where is that source coming from. Obviously, I'm looking at MSNBC. I'll even check out Fox. For me, as many sources as I can get, that's what interests me.

Justin: That's my take on it.

Dr. Latimore: Of course, the Express-News, and of course, through Rivard, all those different--

Justin: Rivard was very clear to tell me that he reads the Express, like sanantonioexpress.com or expressnews.com, but not myessay.com. I didn't realize those were so independent of one another.

Dr. Latimore: Yes, I never thought about that.

Justin: Yes, I didn't either.

Dr. Latimore: I'm just finding the news because and I guess because of what I do and doing social history, African American social history, you're finding whatever you can. It's not always a treasure trove of research for you. You're getting pieces and shards here in a bit there, and you bring it together, and then you evaluate it. I think that's prepared me for the society that we live in now, in which you don't always know the validity of a source unless if you test it.

That's something that I try to do with my students is trying to help them move through the process of how do you evaluate sources? One of the ways of doing this is you find out where things are coming from. You look at it and compare it to other things. Who's writing something? I think it's the same thing that we had to do when we look at the news today because there's a lot of news out there. [crosstalk]

Justin: There's so much that's not news that calls itself news.

Dr. Latimore: Exactly.

Justin: All right, hidden gems in San Antonio. We do this with everybody. For me things like the Tea Garden, the further out missions, those are some things when I first moved here, I didn't know they existed. I think, "Oh, if you're coming to San Antonio, you got to go away from that and go check out some of these things." Do you have any hidden gems in San Antonio you recommend?

Dr. Latimore: Susie's Lumpia House.

Justin: I've never even heard of this.

Dr. Latimore: It's a Filipino restaurant in Culebra. Is it still open? With COVID, I always have to ask because I haven't-- You never known.

Justin: You reached around and asked your wife just so people--

Dr. Latimore: Yes, ask my wife who's Filipino.

Justin: Just so you don't look crazy asking the wall or something. [laughs]

Dr. Latimore: I'm always asking. I'm seriously doing that.

Justin: Susie's Lumpia House.

Dr. Latimore: Yes, it's on Culebra road.

Justin: Is that L-U-M-P-I-A?

Dr. Latimore: Yes. An amazing Filipino restaurant. On Saturdays, they typically offer a buffet, which I don't know how that's working with COVID these days, but they have some great--

Justin: Go-to dish?

Dr. Latimore: Chicken adobo.

Justin: Adobo?

Dr. Latimore: Yes.

Justin: Okay.

Dr. Latimore: A-D-O-B-O.

Justin: Anything else?

Dr. Latimore: They have these great shrimp. There's a word that they call it but I can't think-- Just whatever, there’s shrimp. Go for their shrimp. It's really good.

Justin: All right. I've never eaten Filipino food in San Antonio.

Dr. Latimore: The pork adobo was good too if you like pork. I'm not a big pork eater.

Justin: Adobo is the sauce I assume?

Dr. Latimore: Yes. It's vinegary. At this place, it's more of a vinegary type salt base.

Justin: All right. Like the barbecue you're used to.

Dr. Latimore: Yes, exactly. In Virginia, we do-- Vinegar is very, which I guess is why Susie's Lumpia, it reminds me of a [crosstalk] certain things.

Justin: Sure.

Dr. Latimore: Now, some Filipino restaurants are a little more sweet-based than the vinegar-base depending on the island that they're from. These people actually from the island of Samar. Which is a more centrally located Island.

Justin: Is there 100 islands in the Philippines? There's tons of them, right?

Dr. Latimore: Thousands.

Justin: Inhabited hundred?

Dr. Latimore: Yes, and hundreds of languages as well.

Justin: Oh, wow.

Dr. Latimore: Each one of those islands often has their own language. I don't call it a language, because sometimes we classify something as a dialect and it's really a language. A dialect almost makes it sound like it's not real and legitimate versus a language when we say that that's something that's different and distinct. I may have a southern dialect, but it's a English language. These are real languages that are distinct.

Justin: Okay. What are you teaching currently?

Dr. Latimore: Currently, I'm on leave. [crosstalk]

Justin: When was the last classes you taught?

Dr. Latimore: The last of the semester that just ended, I taught the African American Experience since reconstruction. I also taught a course on the Old South, which looks at Southern politics, race, economics, really from the beginning-- When I say the beginning, looking at a little bit of the indigenous population in the south, in the early period on up through colonization, through the Civil War.

Justin: Does the South cover Texas in your class?

Dr. Latimore: It does.

Justin: Do you consider Texas to be part of the South?

Dr. Latimore: I do.

Justin: All of it or the dividing line?

Dr. Latimore: It's hard to cut up a state, but I do think that West Texas is not really southern.

Justin: It's more the Southwest.

Dr. Latimore: It's the Southwest.

Justin: East Texas is more the South.

Dr. Latimore: East Texas, you've got cotton. Although, you do have slavery in San Antonio. You have out in Wilson County and Seguin and all those that there-- These are pockets there....