Appreciated among Latin Americanists in the United States andhighly regarded in Chile, Arnold (“Arnie”) Bauer taught history at the University of California at Davis from 1970 to 2005, and was director of the University of California’s Education Abroad Program in Santiago, Chile, for five years between 1994 and 2005. Well-known for hisengaging writing style, Bauer reflects broad interests in his publications:agrarian history (Chilean Rural Society: From the Spanish Conquest to 1930 [1975]), the Catholic Church and society (as editor, La iglesia en la economía de América Latina, siglos XIX–XIX [1986]), and material culture (Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture [2001]). He has also written an academic mystery regarding a sixteenth-century Mexican codex, The Search for the Codex Cardona (2009). His coming-of-agememoir (Time’s Shadow: Remembering a Family Farm in Kansas [2012]) describes his childhood and was recently named one of the top five books of 2012 by The Atlantic. He has also written some 50 articles and book chapters and more than 60 book reviews.

Among Bauer’s publications in Spanish is Chile y algo más. Estudios de historia latinoamericana (2004), a collection of essays that Heidi Tinsman has called the chronicle of “a love story” between Bauer and Chile. In 2005, he wasawarded the Order of Merit Gabriela Mistral (Orden al Mérito Docente y Cul- tural Gabriela Mistral), Chile’s highest honor for foreigners, for his contributions to education and culture. His house and small winery in Davis, California, which he built with his own hands, has hosted decades of lively meals and guests as distinguished as Eric Hobsbawm and Fidel Castro’s brother-in-law. Yet, he has always considered himself an “accidental academic.” This interview follows the twists and turns of Bauer’s unusual career.

Charles Walker:
Let’s start with the rather uncommon path you took tobecoming a Latin Americanist. It’s quite different from most, I believe.

Arnold Bauer:
Yes, I’d think so. I was born on a 160-acre farm northeast of the town of Clay Center, Kansas, 15 miles of unpaved roads from the nearestdoctor, with my Aunt Helen serving as midwife. My great-grandparents home-steaded that land after the Civil War and it remained in my family until we wereswept away in the 1960s by what I learned to call in Berkeley, the onset of “agrarian capitalism.” And I walked the mile and a half to the iconic one-roomrural school—a total of 15 kids in all eight grades. The founding of that school accompanied the Homestead Acts [1862].

Continue reading the full interview here.