Hi, welcome to my blog, my name is Joseph Lopez, aka joey phd. You may be wondering why I am introducing myself, well it is because I want to establish rapport, whether you have met me before or not.
I am writing this blog article in an effort to humanize the Tejano Academic a bit. What is the Tejanx Academic? Why the “x” and not the “o”, because why not? As Texans, or Tejanx, we are fluid with our identity throughout our state. Sometimes we are city slickers, sometimes we are rural town dwellers, vaqueros, rancheros, our identity within the great state of Texas is one that is rooted in resistance, assimilation, continuous adaptation and celebration of our pasts, just like other Texans.
So why mention Academic? Well I am an Academic and on top of that I am a Texas Academic, aka a Tejanx Academic from my own claim. What does it mean to be a Tejanx Academic? Well it can take on multiple meanings for others, as I believe Texas is a melting pot of a state when it comes to identity, whether it’s nationality, race, gender, non-Califorinian (I joke, I joke…).
Personally I identify as Tejanx Academic in many ways. My nuanced lived reality includes:
- I was born and raised in San Antonio, Tx,
- Attended public school K-12 in San Antonio (Glenn Oaks, Pat Neff & Holmes)
- I obtained my B.S., M.A. and Ph.D. at U.T. Austin
- Taught in San Antonio, TX at UIW for 7 years
- I now teach at Texas A&M (College Station) and have been for the past 7 years
So why am I making this so explicit in terms of my identity and why now? It is currently 2025 and we are at a crossroads in higher education in Texas. We have politicians, who select regents and regents who are creating policy that is endangering what it means to be a Tejanx Academic, to the point that it may become illegal for myself to discuss my own lineage, heritage and upbringing in this great state. On November 13th the Texas A&M regents declared advocacy for race and gender ideology by faculty against Texas A&M policy.
While this may sound good to many Texans as an effort to bring clarity to higher education curriculum policy and expectations. The issue is who decides what constitutes “advocacy for race and gender ideology,” as well as who gets to decide what the ramifications are. Currently the verbiage of the documents focus on individual faculty adherence more so than systematic.
So why is this an issue for me, I just need to adhere to this policy and I will be fine, correct? Which btw I do, and btw I teach as a centrist in my classroom environment. I believe everyone should be treated with dignity and be humanized when discussing tough issues in the classroom. We all have where we come from, how we were raised, our ideals, morals, ethics and world views. And we are constantly learning and changing who we are in a higher learning environment.
So what’s the issue? Why do I feel compelled to delineate myself as Tejanx Academic? Because as a Texan my own lived reality is unique, just like German Texans, Czech Texans, African Texans, Indigenous Texans. Our heritages are to be celebrated, remembered and passed on in meaningful ways.
So again, why would I be at risk for stating I am a Tejanx Academic? Well part of it is through my family’s history. And part of it is through my education.
I come from a family that has a deep history in Texas. On my mothers side, I am an 8th generation Texan through her mothers lineage, both Blas Maria Herrera & Jose Navarro are part of my family tree. Herrera and Navarro are both original signees of the Declaration of Independence of Texas, and it should be noted they were the only two who were Tejano. There is history and nuance as to their involvement and what both went on to do in Texas and it is directly part of my lineage. However, if shared in my classroom it could be seen as advocacy for race ideology. And you might ask, “well how would it become part of your education purview?” I currently teach communication and journalism courses, where Texas history often comes up and in general, Texas history is discussed heavily on Texas A&M campus with statues adorning the entire campus. However, if just one student is uncomfortable with me sharing my own lived reality, I could be reported as going against the regents’ new policy. And many may find this far-fetched and maybe it is…
On my fathers side there is a different story. Raised by a strong willed mother, my father and his siblings have gone on to serve the greater Texas area and other states as well. With my father’s sister becoming a Methodist minister, his other sister becoming a life long educator and recognized for her work with Katy ISD with a facility being named after her.
My father’s family benefited from my grandmother’s upbringing, who was raised by her aunt, Jovita Idar, a woman suffragist, community organizer and journalist from Laredo, Texas. Her work was recognized in 2023 by the U.S. mint in the form of being minted on 35 million U.S. Quarters as part of the American Women Quarters Program. Our whole family attended the event and I personally documented it.
So again, what could be an issue about talking about my great great aunt being a journalist in one of my journalism courses? Well one aspect of her recognition as a journalist and publisher was her family’s reporting on the lyncing of Tejanos along the U.S. Mexican border by Texas Rangers. A narrative that when shared could be seen as problematic depending on one’s historical perspectives.
My wife wrote her dissertation about the Crystal City Walkouts from a Chicana perspective, giving insights and lessons learned about the La Raza movement that was formed out of the walkouts. Again an opportunity to learn about the nuance of lived realities of Texans, urban and rural. I learned about Crystal City’s political and activist based past through my wife’s work and visiting Crystal City. I learned about her family being migrant farmworkers and the culture of the rural Tejanos and their story being one of many in Crystal City and rural Tejano communities at large.
My sister in law wrote Curiosity Makes an Engineer, a children’s book about being an electrical engineer and her journey as a woman navigating the profession. I have had her come and share her experiences at my Latin Mexican American Studies courses I was invited to teach at A&M. Her stories resonated with students and deep conversations were had. My brother, also an electrical engineer, also shared his story. His story amazes me to this day, having been a National Hispanic Scholar, being accepted to M.I.T. and instead being recruited by U.T. Austin and obtained employment at I.B.M. before his freshman year. His trajectory is what helped me experience the MITES program, aka Minorities Introduction to Engineering program at U.T. Austin during High School, as a non college bound labeled student.
All this to say, my life as a Tejanx Academic is not something fabricated through an influx of Academic indoctrination, nor media consumption. It is part of my ancestry, my lived cultural and social reality. The fabric of my identity is something through direct experiences here in Texas.
When I began attending UT Austin, I was introduced to the ACTLab, a space developed by Sandy Stone, at the time I was a young republican, as my house was politically divided and leaned to the conservative side. I took the ACTLab course called Soundscapes where I learned about thinking about sound not just technically (as I was a trained audio engineer at the time), but to listen for cultural, social, political, gender and beyond meaning in sound. To face ideas about sound that made me uncomfortable at times, nervous at times, but in the end would help influence who I am today and the way in which I would teach. Sandy shared her lived reality with us. Her lived reality being a Jewish trans woman, one of the founders of Transgender studies, also a recording engineer who had recorded the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills and Nash.
My time at UT definitely had an influence on me intellectually. I went from a student in high school where my English dual credit teacher told me I wouldn’t make it in community college, to doing cutting edge technological work with Google Summer of Code, IC^2, ACTLab TV and many other ventures, facilitated by professors like John Hartigan, Joseph Straubhaar, Andrew Garrison, Charles Ramirez-Berg & Sandy Stone. I finished my academic career at UT Austin with creating a new media style dissertation where I studied Online and Offline Automotive Culture in Central Texas. I did participatory embedded ethnography where I built a 500whp Mercury Grand Marquis and studied street racing, road racing, high-end automotive shops, dealerships and car culture in general. You can see the introduction to my dissertation on youtube and a reflection of the impact of my dissertation 12 years later here on my blog. I continue to write blogs about automotive culture to this day, having documented a local Brazos county event called Wheels, Watches & Whiskey and another article about automotive racing movies.
Additionally I worked in the High-End Audio industry with my Concert Sound, a HiFi shop located in San Antonio, TX while attending UT Austin. Owned by Creston Funk Jr., I learned the ropes over the years and we went from being a HiFi shop to an importer. Creston taught me a lot about being Texan. He was a pretty liberal dude and at the same time he had some major country in him. His family had around 1000 acres around Goliad Texas and we would go visit the family land and swim in a stock tank and check out the oldest tree on their land that was like 3-4ft in diameter, his family definitely had deep roots in Texas, pun intended.
And yes, we would look at the family mineral rights, we would go see the “Christmas Trees” and also the “Cities” that would take place before the trees. I got to see the Howard Hughes industry tool bits. These experiences with Creston was what I considered part of a mentoring of what it can also mean to be Texan. He taught me about board and batten houses, showed me them in Austin and their history and how their architecture dates back to quarters for slaves and house keeping, which were a design that were also influenced by early Texas architecture in general. He would teach me about the Czech community of Castroville, early Texas architecture in general, as well as furniture and their understated aesthetic when compared to victorian style. It should be noted I still am in the Hi-Fi industry and own a local Hi-Fi Shop which I run on the weekends called Joey’s Hi-Fi Shop.
I could go on and on about what makes me a Tejanx Academic, my question to you the reader is, what kind of Texan are you? What is your family’s history, what experiences have you had that makes you unique and proud of your family’s history? Can you share those stories publicly? Will you be seen as an academic indoctrination risk?
And how as Texans will we forge new relationships with those who move here and help them feel welcomed, humanized and dignified? How do we be good stewards of our great state? Create an environment for continued collaboration, interdisciplinary opportunity and cross cultural and social initiatives to keep Texas the diverse melting pot it truly is.