Episode 4 Transcript: Roberto Gonzales

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Vincent del Casino: Hi there, my name is Vincent Del Casino and I am the host of the Accidental Geographer, this podcast set at San Jose State University. As provost and chief academic officer of the university, I have an opportunity to engage faculty in all kinds of great conversations. On today's podcast, I'll be talking to Roberto Gonzalez, professor in the Department of Anthropology. We're gonna cover a wide range of topics, from the use of local technology to the farming and agricultural systems in southern Mexico. To the militarization of technology and everyday life, as well as how we even think about mariachi in the Bay Area region. So come on board, this is gonna be a great conversation. Well, Roberto, thank you so much for taking the time. I've been really looking forward to this conversation. So I appreciate you being here. So thanks so much. Thank you for inviting me. So I always like to kind of start and get an understanding. I mean, you have this really interesting background, not just through your studies, but the kinds of topics you've become interested in. But how do you kind of go, I know you started in engineering and then moved into anthropology. How does that kind of? Thing happen? You know, how do you start to go, Oh, I want to do something a little different, you know, based on where you were.

Roberto Gonzales: Yeah, well, I started out my college years as a mechanical engineering major and did reasonably well. I wasn't a straight A student, but I was set to graduate after five years. And at the end of year four, I was finishing up one of my general ed classes, which happened to be an anthropology class. And I had no idea what anthropology was before that time. I took the course, and it took me You know, it sounds cliche, but it changed my life. And I thought about it, and I reflected on how I was a pretty unhappy engineer most of the times. I had actually worked in what was called a co-op engineer, essentially a student engineer, gotten a taste for what the work was going to be like, and thought, this is the rest of my life that I'm dealing with here. And so I went ahead and had a long conversation with my parents, and signed the paperwork, and changed my major to anthropology. Finished up three semesters later and started graduate school two weeks after my summer 1992 graduation. So it was all kind of a big blur and I hit the ground running in graduate school because I had a lot of momentum behind me. And I found out later that those four years of engineering training are what got me into graduate school. That's really what distinguished apparently my application from the hundreds of others that came in to UC Berkeley which is where I ultimately studied. So that's kind of the background story. The irony here is that almost all of the research that I've done since then connects with engineering and science in some way, kind of STEM work. And so, and you know, I love engineering. I still have a big spot in my heart for it, a warm spot. I've got a brother and a sister who are engineers. It's a great fit for them, but it wasn't for me. But the irony is, I've actually gotten published in an engineering journal. And I've got another excerpt from my new book coming out in the same journal, IEEE Spectrum. And my brother, Kidzman, he says, who would've thought you're publishing in engineering journals with an anthropology degree? So that's just kind of the way things have turned out.

Vincent del Casino: Yeah, no, it's so interesting. You know, I started as a chemistry major. And for me, I hit that class a little earlier. It was political geography of Africa. And I went, oh my gosh, like this is what geographers study? And I became totally enamored and changed my major. Same conversation with the parents as well. It's an awkward one, you know? Yeah, it was tough. Because my dad would, first to get a bachelor's degree and my father was like. What are you going to do with that? It was the 80s, so I was studying Japanese as well. So there were ways to talk through it at the time. So tell me a little bit more about that interest in science and technology and the kinds of projects you got interested in early and how you've been thinking about that relationship, because now it's at the forefront of every conversation. There's almost nowhere you go in this moment where we don't talk about that. But you've been doing that for a really long time.

Roberto Gonzales: Yeah, well, my graduate studies took me to South Mexico, to a state called Oaxaca, a state that is incredible because of its cultural diversity, 17 different ethno-linguistic groups in that one state. By far, it's the most ethnically diverse state in Mexico. And working with my graduate advisor at Berkeley, You know, I talked with her about my interests. I wanted to learn more about indigenous cultures in Mexico. And she recommended Oaxaca State and a region that she knew from her previous field research. And so I went there in 1994 for the first time. And for the next five years, I would come and go over a total of about 24 months as I did my doctoral research. And focused on traditional farming practices, subsistence farming, maize farming primarily. Beans, sugarcane, and coffee are also important crops. And I approached it, I didn't quite know how I was going to approach it at first, so I did what an anthropologist does, which is to talk with a lot of people. I learned by doing, so I actually spent a lot of time out in the fields, helping subsistance farmers with their work and asking them a lot questions. And the conclusion that I came to was that They were scientists. The way they were approaching their work was really using a form of trial and error in the same way that a laboratory scientist might. And that's what I wrote my book about. The dissertation did eventually become a book titled Sapotec Science, Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca. And it's become kind of a modern classic, I think, in ethnographies of Latin America. And I think the way I approached it at the time seemed really revolutionary because not a whole lot of people were treating subsistence farming as a kind of scientific, and in fact some of the reviews came back from some journal saying, well, Gonzalez might as well call everything science if he's calling indigenous farmers scientists. So, in retrospect, though, I think the book was probably ahead of its time. But looking back on it now, I realize that my engineering training is all over that book. If you look at even the illustrations and sort of the approach that I took, you can tell very much that that engineering background left its imprint on that project. And so from there, that was, you know, that's really the beginning of my anthropology career. And I've gone on to do many other things since then. I've done. Quite a bit of research on the military and the different ways, kind of critical analysis of the ways the military has used scientific knowledge, whether from the social sciences or more recently from the world of tech and Silicon Valley technologies. And I've also revisited Oaxaca looking at a different side of science and technology there. And that was an investigation into how villages. Uh... Have created their own community-based cell phone networks of our things and which we can talk about a bit later so that i mean it in a way it seems that my career's taken me in very different ways but i realize now you know after twenty five years of doing this that the common thread is that that focus on science and technology though in very difficult ways and defined differently than we often think of science or technology or innovation

Vincent del Casino: Yeah, I want to unpack that a little bit because I do think it's really important. And it actually goes to one of these core tensions. I think that comes because of anthropology and its methodology of doing ethnographic work on the ground with people all the time, which is there's the ways in which people take up knowledge and then produce it and think about it. And they may not even be defining it as science in that way. Right. But you came in and said, Hey, I think there's scientific practices there. But it is a question of how we create a meet a meaning right around something like that. And what people got nervous about, I suspect, is you opened up the category and said, you know, what science is more than the way in which we thought about it. So talk a little bit about some of those challenges of that. Your challenges of science and then how that reaction played out a little bit, I'm actually genuinely curious.

Roberto Gonzales: Yeah, well, I don't think in anthropology it was so controversial because anthropologists have been doing that kind of thing for a long time, but because I intentionally wrote the book in a way that I hoped would reach non-anthropological audiences. Here we're talking about my first book, Zapotec Science. I think that's when other reviewers, for example, historians of science and technology started to ask questions and to raise their criticisms about it. The way I approached it was the way I think any good cultural anthropologist would, which is to not take anything for granted and talk with people and try to understand their basic assumptions, the premises from which they go about living their lives and doing their work. And I'll just give one example that to me, after speaking with people seemed very obvious, but on the surface might seem just sort of bizarre. Um, the villagers, uh, in this town called Taleat, small Zapotec village, 2,000 people, they would tell stories sometimes about maize, and I kind of categorized them as folktales or fables or what have you. And so, for example, in one case, there was a big basket of maize kernels, which, you know, people make tortillas and tamales and all kinds of staple foods from. And then the story goes that one night, the maze just suddenly disappeared. There was a rush that sounded like rushing water in the dark of night. And in the morning, the family found that the basket was completely empty. It turns out that the man refused to give maze to a woman who was desperately in need in the village, and therefore, the moral of the story is, or the punchline was. So maize has a heart and maize understands when it's not being shared and being used as a gift. And that started for me a process of realizing that from the world view and from the basic assumptions of the people, maize is a living being. It's not just a plant, this has a will of its own. It's got the ability to punish people who disrespect it or who treat it selfishly. And that was one of a number of basic cultural assumptions that I thought drove a kind of attention and focus on maze and producing good maze and sharing it and so that the science and the technology and the knowledge becomes integrated into patterns of social relationships and community life and an Intra-community life as well between villages And so I started to have this much broader view of of what science is and how it functions within the framework of a particular culture

Vincent del Casino: It's a really interesting point because for me that the intersection of human non human relations and the activity that goes and the even the The action that non human objects can have on us. We have the assumption has been particularly within kind of westernized frameworks is that we are moving the earth. We are, but we rarely think about how the earth moves us or and so In that indigenous context, they had or they knew that they had unpacked that and appreciated that relationship already and it does seem to be a thread throughout your work is that these quote unquote non human actors have roles in our lives, right?

Roberto Gonzales: Right. Yeah. I mean, that's really one of the things that to me was was eye-opening because I had never really considered that or given that perspective the benefit of the doubt. There's a very well-known anthropologist, you know, who's written a number of books that were part of the classic canon. He's long since passed away. Edward Evans Pritchard was his name, and he wrote a famous book on witchcraft in among the Azande peoples of Africa. And there's this wonderful appendix that he has in his book where He reflects on doing this kind of field work on witchcraft. And he talks about some incident that happened to him. And he poses a rhetorical question, which is, did I believe in witchcraft at the time? Because he saw something that could have no possible explanation. And he said, well, yes, I suppose that I did for the time that I was among the Azande. And I found that system of belief to be every bit as good as my own, perhaps better in this cultural setting. And I think that sort of framework or willingness to sort of let go and suspend your disbelief and be open to accepting radically different perspectives or points of view or cultural assumptions can really be eye-opening and informative in interesting ways. Just to get back to Mays momentarily, when you treat Mays as something more than just a plant, as I call it a plant person in my book, you're treating it with such respect and giving it such attention and love. That you're bound to be really good at taking care of it. You know, when you invest that much meaning and emotion, even in something, that's going to be the end result. And you know, this is really important for millennia, this has been important. And this part of Oaxaca is actually not too distant from the site in which Mays was originally domesticated 8,000 years ago, which is right along the Puebla-Oaxaca border. So the cultures of that area, the different ethnic groups, really place prime importance on that crop in particular, that plant person.

Vincent del Casino: Well, I have so many questions coming out. This is so awesome. One of which is I have been to Oaxaca. And one of the interesting things about that region, and I'd like you to explore it for us just a little bit. You said at the beginning, but the multiplicity of ethnicities and languages and other things going on there, especially from a US lens, there's this monolith called Mexico. And the complexity of it is hardly ever really unpacked. But Oaxaca is a brilliant place to look at all that complexity and the tensions within Mexican society, right, between the dominant Mexico City sort of cultural gemini and the of indigeneity in states like Oaxaca, Chiapas, and others, right?

Roberto Gonzales: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're right on about that. There is, I mean here we are neighbors to this country that we have such a complex history of. I mean all the towns and cities in California that start with San or Santa, you know. This was Mexico and New Spain before that. So you know the history goes way back, yet the ignorance in our country is pretty astonishing sometimes. And if I hadn't become an anthropologist, I would say I would also be as ignorant. But yes, I mean, Mexico is an incredibly rich country in terms of its cultural heritage. There are close to 60 different indigenous languages still spoken in Mexico. And Oaxaca, as I said, is the state with the most complex variety of cultures. Unfortunately, as, I'm sure, some of your viewers we'll know. Racism is also a big problem in Mexico. There's a strong anti-indigenous sentiment, and there has been going back since the colonial period. And there is also, in parts of Mexico, an erosion of knowledge, of indigenous knowledge and indigenous languages. Oaxaca is a state that is, that I think in the past 20 years has really turned the corner on that, and now you see all kinds of regions and villages Where they've got bilingual schools, there's a kind of renaissance happening where villages that have forgotten or with the languages were being forgotten are now placing prime importance on them. And ironically, I think part of what's been driving this are things like tourism, where you've got people from, tourists from Japan and Germany and the United States and Canada coming precisely because they are interested, genuinely interested in that cultural diversity. And so people have come to realize this is something really important that we must preserve. It's a state that's complex enough geographically speaking that there are pockets where the indigenous languages are still predominant, where there's still only a minority of people that speak Spanish. The public education system has changed a lot of that. But I think I'm optimistic in terms of the kind of cultural revival that's happening in that state in particular And I think it's starting to have some knock-on knock-off effects throughout the country as well But it's a really for I mean books have been written about this kind of thing By Mexican intellectuals primarily but very very interesting and complex society that again We have very close connections with here in the United States

Vincent del Casino: Yeah, the parallels for me in Northern Thailand, where I did a lot of my work as well, and you know, the way with Northern Thai and other indigenous languages come up in relation to the Bangkok Center core is really fascinating. But I want to pivot a little bit with this. So it still sticking within that region, the work on on on from remotely global, right, the book there, and how the title of how an indigenous village wired itself into the 21st century. It's a fascinating thing because technological sovereignty movements are emerging all over the place where people are going, you know what, this might be a human right. This might be something I should have access to in this world today. So how did that become an area of interest for you? And then what kind of things did you start to unpack as you started to understand this question?

Roberto Gonzales: Yeah, this is a really good story unto itself. I mean, so for me, you know, doctoral dissertation work in the 90s, book in the early 2000s, I start working in San Jose and seem to not have time for trips to Oaxaca anymore or the money to do it. And so that research started to slip by the wayside a bit as I took on other interests and other projects, mainly having to do with militarization in US society. However, about 2013 or 2014, I was in one of my classes talking about the good old days in Oaxaca, as many anthropologists love to talk about their research experiences abroad. And a student a few days later came to me and said, hey, that village, Talea, you were telling us about, I think I read about it in USA Today. And I was kind of shocked and did a quick internet search and lo and behold, There's this. You know, sort of front-line story on this remote village in Mexico that's built its own cell phone network called Talea de Castro, population 2,000 in the mountains of Oaxaca. And I'm just, I have this moment where I think, oh my God, how many years has it been since I've contacted people there?

Vincent del Casino: Yeah.

Roberto Gonzales: And so at the time, the only way to really reach my friends there was through Skype. So I Skyped them after like a five-year period. And the answer on the other line was, basically, where the hell have you been? We miss you. And so we had a conversation. And we kind of started the conversation going. And in any case, what I did was try to really better understand the story of what happened with his cell phone network. And it's a fascinating story on the one hand because it sounds a lot like a David and Goliath story. So you've got the small village that is confronting big telecom. And in Mexico, these are some of the biggest companies in the country.

Vincent del Casino: That's right.

Roberto Gonzales: And big government, and neither the government nor the cell phone companies want to provide service to this remote region because they say, we can't make any money there. I mean, it's not viable economically. And so what the villagers did, that's really the starting point of my story. What I do is to walk through the process of how they did it, both in technical terms, the technological process, but more importantly, the social process. What relationships did they have to build? With what organizations, with what other communities in the region, with funding sources that weren't from government or weren't from industry, and that's really what the story is about. And it's not really a David and Goliath story, I don't wanna give a spoiler here, but I'll just say it didn't turn out quite the way the media presented it. The media likes those David and Golieth stories, positive press is good. You know, from the editor's perspective, but the story's more complicated. In the end, they let the community cell phone network go, and now they have a commercial service. Ironically, the same companies that didn't want to provide service are now doing it. And the reasons for that, I explained in the book, I think, have to do with a sense of pragmatism on the part of the villagers, and so that's the path that they took. So the story, for me, was one that, It was a great- way of reflecting also on what it's like to do research in a village 20 years after first getting there.

Vincent del Casino: Getting here.

Roberto Gonzales: Which to me was extremely satisfying. And for, I did return to the village finally. I had plans to return in 2020 in the pandemic hit and that didn't happen. But in 2023, I returned 2022 and then again, this year or last year 2023 and I'm visiting there this semester as well. So I've reestablished those relationships and that book I'm very proud of because it did. It was tough to get my mind back into Oaxaca to do a whole book project again, but I think it went very well, I'm told.

Vincent del Casino: You know, it's really interesting and it's fascinating to see like the evolution there and I love the story and how it is always more complex on the ground as people like manage and negotiate those kind of things. What I want to ask about a little bit then is it and again not surprising for me very similar like hard to get to Thailand all the time once I started my first job resources but just time so you began to think about what are other questions that are important and interesting to me and so that militarization the questions of militarization and most recently in war virtually the ways in which technology war and conflict are kind of coming together. What got that interest going? And then what are the kinds of things you're seeing right now that are important, that you want, that you're mapping out in projects like this?

Roberto Gonzales: Well, the interest in the military, for me, it was something that I found, just the relationship, first of all, between anthropologists and the military. American anthropologists in particular was interesting to me from graduate school and I took a course called Anthropology and the Cold War that just fascinated me. So when the 9-11 attacks happened and then shortly after that, the U.S. Led the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, I was just, first of all, I was pretty outraged and participated in the teach-ins that were happening on this campus early in my career here and so forth. But by 2005, 2006, there were reports coming out that anthropologists were actually being recruited to participate in the war as embedded ethnographers, essentially, with combat brigades. And I was very upset by that because it was like the Vietnam era was reliving. Was being replayed and that's a period that was really fraught in the discipline anthropology because there were anthropologists working for the CIA and for the US military essentially doing secret secret work. That was compromising the safety of villagers in places like Vietnam and Thailand and so on and Cambodia and so I knew enough about the ethical pitfalls of that kind of work to be become very interested and. I want to say it was accidental, but I had some leads. I had heard about a couple of sources that were reporting on anthropologists doing this sort of work. So I dug around and looked through some military journals, actually. Military Review was the one that sticks in my mind. And discovered that sure enough, there was a plan that had been launched by the Army in 2006 called the Human Terrain Program, Human Terain Systems Program. And that was precisely the goal, to embed social scientists with combat brigades. And so I started writing about it. And the response was very immediate and quick. From the discipline, I found a British journal that was able to publish my work very quickly, peer-reviewed journal, and that generated lots of controversy and even some media attention. And that really changed the direction of my research. So in a way, it was somewhat by accident or fortuitous that my... That my career sort of pulled me in that direction, but I've always been open to those opportunities and seized on them when I thought it was important to do so. And because of the ethical issues at stake, I did. So that's how I got involved in the military's relationship with science. First, through social scientists, through recruitment of social scientists. And then this was also a part of a broader sort of counterinsurgency effort that the U.S. Military was really interested in pursuing during that time. Those years. But then, as I continued along these lines, what I discovered was that right around 2013 and 2014, the US military started to veer away towards these counterinsurgency approaches and started to really focus more on what was being called net-centric warfare or data-driven warfare. And this is happening at the same time that communications technologies are becoming more sophisticated. AI is starting to take off in ways that it hadn't before. And so I just followed that thread. I mean, I have become very comfortable reading through the literature that comes out of DOD and defense tech companies and things of that kind. Here my engineering training helps for sure. And also I think my understanding of the way that engineers are trained has helped me. Understand those processes, too, and make certain connections as I pursue my research. So that's really how things turned out for me. And again, when I've gotten back to Oaxaca or written a book or an article on Oaxac, that's been almost as a release, because doing this kind of work on the various ways the territories incorporating science and advanced technologies. Can be pretty dark and pretty frightening sometimes actually. And I think I would maybe lose it a little bit if that's all I was doing. So Oaxaca does give me that bit of release.

Vincent del Casino: Well, and the relationship to technology is not always just uniform to that tension around militarization or something, but I mean, I totally understand it because geographic information science is an area within my discipline of geography, emerges from smart bomb technologies, the ways in which we needed to map and understand precision. So a lot of social sciences have this interrelationship historically, including a long history of relationship. With military action and other things like that. So one of the things ethnographically that you talk about in the appendix of this book on the sub rosa, the work you have to do, can you flesh that out for us a little bit? What do you mean by that? Because it is an interesting question because you state that the core of anthropology is often participant observation, connection, and that's harder methodologically in the context of this. So what do you means by that and how does that work out for you methodologically?

Roberto Gonzales: Yeah, that's a great question. The way I was trained as a graduate student, and the way I think most graduate students in cultural anthropology were trained in the 1990s, is yes, to interview people. How to really do a good ethnographic interview means you've got to build rapport and trust. And it took some effort to do that in Oaxaca. I did it. But once your interests start turning towards the military and defense tech firms and things like that. How do you do the research if they're not going to let you in the door? I don't have a top secret clearance. I don't have any kind of a, of a clearance to get me past the cafeteria in the Pentagon. So, so how do I do it then? The way that, and that's what the appendix is about. As a graduate student, the, my graduate advisor was Laura Nader, who's very well known in the field of anthropology because she back in 1969 or 1970 proposed something that she called studying up. It was exactly about, it was methods for studying powerful institutions. And so that really informed the approach that I took. And so the most important suggestion that she had that I was able to use was to use documentary materials, even if, or especially if they're produced by the secretive institutions themselves. So if you don't have easy access to Pentagon leaders or to researchers in the Army Research Office or the Naval Laboratories, then one thing you might do is look for peer review publications that have come out of those offices or leaked, there's all kinds of information on WikiLeaks that one can find as well. There's all kinds of material that's out there. A lot of this has been declassified material, but that doesn't mean that those are always easy to access or understand or make sense of. And I think that's where the real anthropological skills have to come in. And that requires sometimes reaching out to people that you might have met along the way at conferences who do have some military experience and can sort of help you navigate that. So that was really. The way I learned to approach this research on the military. Now, that's not the only method that I've used. I've also used some ethnographic interviews because after I started publishing papers, interestingly enough, some people from within the military establishment reached out to me, oftentimes not using their real names, oftentimes not wanting to be identified for fear of retribution, and started sharing things with me about things that they knew or things that were concerned with. And so those people have been a really important source of information for me over the years. In fact, I've got one colleague who is an anthropologist who works as a military educator within the military educational university system, who read every page of my last book on the military and corrected many things because this person felt that it was really important that this book reach as many. Military people as possible. And the argument that this colleague gave was that there are lots of people that are also concerned, it's not a monolith, the Pentagon's not the same thing, as people make it out to be. And so I really appreciated those kinds of comments and that kind of sophisticated way of approaching the subject matter.

Vincent del Casino: Yeah, I mean that that notion that culture and the way in which it operates is always complex and why would we assume that everyone within an organization or institution for my own work, you know, in public health, you meet people in biomedical field and you assume they've all bought in. But some for me during the 90s during the HIV crisis in Thailand, there are plenty of nurses and others who fully embrace local indigenous knowledge around plants and and other things to help people cope with an epidemic that. Biomedical science had not figured out yet, right? So there are all these cracks and fissures within these big, giant things that we sometimes assume are just, everyone buys in a wholesale. But the complexity of that is really important. And that anthropology, that anthropological perspective is super valuable in looking at that institutions and unpacking some.

Roberto Gonzales: Yeah, very much so. Very much so, you know, recently I was invited to speak at what was called an AI summit. And first time I've ever been invited to speak at a summit. And I accepted the invitation, not knowing quite what to expect, because the list of speakers included Lieutenant Generals and retired generals and plenty of CEOs from the defense tech firms. And I said, are you sure you have the right person here that you're inviting? And the person who invited me said, yeah, we actually want some critical perspectives here. And so I gave him some critical perspective.

Vincent del Casino: Yeah.

Roberto Gonzales: I didn't know if I was going to make many friends afterwards, but that wasn't why I was there. I was genuinely interested in these cultural events and these cultural spaces. But to my surprise, I had one procurement official from, or procurement officer I think is the title, from the Joint Artificial, or from the joint intelligence branch of U.S. Central Command. And then an analyst, an intelligence analyst from the DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency. And they were both complimenting me for bringing a breath of fresh air into the discussion. So the colleague that I've got that's been to a number of these events said, most people are gonna shut you off, but you're gonna get your points across to a few people and it's important to make those contacts and to establish those relationships because you're going to learn from them at some point. So that was a time well spent, I think, on my part.

Vincent del Casino: All right, so I'll hit up the one last question. So you already hit on this point, which is sort of the accidents. The whole point of the podcast for me has always been there are moments that we connect or serendipity sometimes that comes up. So one last thing to talk about is Mariachi by Moonlight, which I have a feeling is sort of like something of a passion project, something of mercury. What is it, why did this become of interest to you as an anthropologist and what is this about?

Roberto Gonzales: Yeah, this is this is gonna sound strange. I mean after all that we've talked about today Yeah, but part of what happened when I was in Oaxaca is that I was recruited to join the village band I happened to have learned trumpet in junior high and played in the high school band in South, Texas and so on To my surprise that helped me do my research in O'haka because it helped me make friends and when you're a musician You get invited all over the place I was a part of a small mariachi group that was created in the village during that time and I had a pretty good feel for the songs because I heard a lot of them growing up. My dad has always loved mariachi music. So I learned the standards and there's a lot standards, you know, I would estimate four or five hundred basics that any mariachi has to know and a lot that happened in Oaxaca. I came back to the US, got my first real job at San Jose State as an anthropologist And realize you know the Bay Area's pretty expensive, I could use a few extra bucks. And so I got together with some friends from graduate school and some undergrads that I knew from UC Berkeley. We put together a student band and pretty soon a couple of us split off and actually started working as mariachis on weekends. And even during the week when I wasn't teaching, of course, and on a good week, I would bring in maybe 800 to $1,000. Wow. You know, we split up equally.

Vincent del Casino: I could suspect what your salary was when you first got a job here.

Roberto Gonzales: Yeah, things were different back then, for sure. But in any case, this went on for about four years. And at one point, the group of musicians I was playing with, we had a regular gig in San Francisco's Mission District at a seafood restaurant. And that was great. Out of that job came multiple jobs to play quinceañeras and weddings and all kinds of events. And so things started to really get out of hand 2007 2008 and I realized you know if I really want tenure I probably should should pull back a little bit and So I was invited to write a short piece for a new genre experiment in anthropology that's being called flash ethnography where you try to write about some cultural event or Incident in 800 words or less, which is really challenging Yeah, and so I thought what a great excuse to reflect on those four or five years of my life and try to bring some of the many stories into this short piece as possible. And so that's really what inspired this Mariachi by Moonlight piece, which you can find online pretty easily. But in any case, I had such fun writing that and reliving the old days that I have decided at some point in the future, though I'm too busy right now, to write a short book about it.

Vincent del Casino: Oh, that's awesome.

Roberto Gonzales: And because there were a lot of stories, but also it's a very interesting kind of anthropological window to see the Bay Area.

Vincent del Casino: Yeah.

Roberto Gonzales: From the point of view of the undocumented immigrants that I was playing music with, or as I say in peace, from the backseat of a minivan, which is how we carted ourselves around the Bay Area.

Vincent del Casino: All right. Well, now I'm super glad that I actually asked that question because it's so interesting and awesome. And I just love how you weave your your your intellectual curiosity into things that, you know, everyday life, which is really at the heart of what anthropology I think is about is that how the everyday world kind of plays out. So thank you so much again for this. Really appreciate it. Love the conversation. And I look forward to having more in the future.

Roberto Gonzales: Thanks, Vin. Yeah, this has been a real fun pleasure. Awesome. Thanks.

Vincent del Casino: Awesome. Well, I think I could probably talk about this with you for another two, three hours, particularly around the impact of AI and the ways we think about it. Maybe we'll have to schedule another podcast. But I just wanna thank you so much for taking the time. I really enjoy your work. I appreciate your contributions here at San Jose State. And it's just really exciting to be able to have this discussion. So thank you, so much.

Roberto Gonzales: Thank you again for the invitation. I appreciate it.

Vincent del Casino: Absolutely.