The Office of Global Affairs is excited to celebrate Tony Lucero for our February 2025 edition of the Global Visionaries series. The Global Visionaries series highlights the UW’s global impact by featuring innovative, globally-engaged faculty, staff, students and alumni.
Dr. José Antonio (Tony) Lucero, is Professor and Chair of the Comparative History of Ideas Department and a Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. He also has courtesy appointments in the Department of Geography and in American Indian Studies. Dr. Lucero describes his experience centering reciprocity in his research and teaching, leading study abroad programs to Peru and Ecuador, and exploring the role universities can play in challenging global hierarchies of knowledge.
Dr. Lucero obtained a MA/PhD in Politics from Princeton University and a BA in Political Science from Stanford University. His knowledge and expertise includes Indigenous politics, critical university studies, social movements, Latin American politics and borderlands.
I was born in El Paso, Texas and raised on both sides of the Mexico-US border. My dad’s family has been crossing the border between New Mexico and Chihuahua for generations, before there was even a border to cross. From a very young age, border-crossing was just a matter of everyday life. Everyone had family on both sides of the border. I grew up speaking Spanish and English. I spent my early years in Ciudad Juárez but my family moved to El Paso when I was about six years old. It wasn’t until I left El Paso that I realized how unusual it was to move so fluidly across international lines. As I got older, though, I realized I had a very thin understanding of my own family’s history.
In college, I became more curious about Latin America. I ultimately decided to pursue it as my area of expertise as I thought about PhD programs. However, before I decided to focus on Latin America, I was initially interested in Italy. I studied Italian for two years and studied abroad in Italy. I was really interested in Machiavelli, so I decided to study in Florence where I read Machiavelli’s journals in the archives, and was so amazed to be reading things he wrote in his own hand. That experience was transformative. It was on that study abroad program that I realized that an academic life could be an international one.
Ever since my own experience studying abroad in Italy, I was captivated by the idea of interacting with other peoples, ideas, histories and languages as part of one’s education.
Before I came to the University of Washington, my wife (María Elena García, Comparative History of Ideas Department) and I were both teaching on the East Coast. We were living in New Jersey – she was teaching in New York and I was teaching in Philadelphia– New Jersey was in the middle. When we had the opportunity to come to the UW, we were very excited about living and working in the same city. The UW was, though, never on our radar. However, for me, the University and Seattle were kind of love at first sight.
I was hired to teach in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, and after being at UW for a couple of years became the Chair of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. A few years later, I asked to move part of my line to the Comparative History of Ideas Department (CHID). I was drawn to this one-of-a-kind department where students are free to explore an interdisciplinary liberal arts degree within the context of a big public research university. CHID is really unique – it questions orthodoxy, encourages students to follow their interests, and challenges faculty to unlearn some of their disciplinary habits. It’s a department where ideas can thrive and roam free. I eventually became Chair of CHID and am currently in year three of a five year term.
Our study abroad program to Peru emerged organically. I did my dissertation research in Ecuador in the 1990s and it’s a place that I had been meaning to go back to for a long time. Two years ago, I was on the dissertation committee of a brilliant Ecuadorian PhD student, Juan Mateo Espinosa. He is a medical doctor and his family has been farming the same land for generations, just outside of Quito. He felt that the best way to contribute to people’s health was through the soil. He wrote this incredible dissertation about what we can learn from herbs, plants and the land. He shared that we can really learn from the way Indigenous people have been in relationship with different ecosystems and food systems for millenia. During his dissertation defense, Juan Mateo Espinosa shared photographs of the soil. It’s a technique called chromatography; you take a photograph of the soil, and it gives you a sense of the health of the soil. It was amazing to see the soil come alive in incredible patterns and colors. He also collaborated with Ecuadorian poets. He shared the photographs with them and they composed verses based on the images of the land. It was very moving to see him share multiple stories – scientific, visual and poetic – about the land.
This approach to centering native knowledge really resonated with me. CHID is all about different ways of knowing in the world. I connected with Juan Mateo Espinosa afterwards to pitch a CHID study abroad program to him and he agreed. He is committed to being in Ecuador but he likes to have a connection with the academy in the Global North. We ran the program for the first time last year and it was tremendous. We had a terrific group of UW students. We worked with five Indigenous farmers who are incredible human beings. They were very generous hosts and we learned so much from them. The program went so well that one of our students has already booked his travel to go back to Ecuador this summer. He’s going to be living on one of the farms we visited for a couple of weeks before going to the Amazon. Another student, for her CHID thesis, is bringing an Amazonian Indigenous leader that we worked closely with to Seattle in May to create a toolkit for other students about how they can create experiences of reciprocity.
The study abroad program is based on Juan Mateo Espinosa’s work in agro-ecology. It’s all about how people have different ways of thinking and knowing. Fundamentally, it’s about how we can work with nature instead of against it. Instead of relying on pesticides and fertilizers, the program explores how to support the soil by leveraging microorganisms and other living forces in the soil and environment. Indigenous people have been doing this forever. The program has urban and rural components to it. We begin in a university town and do day trips to local Andean farms that are accessible by bus. We learn about the relationships between Indigenous farmers and the land and what they farm. We learn about traditional cooking techniques, such as Pachamanca. It means to cook in the earth and involves digging a hole, setting a fire, heating up stones and adding layers of herbs and spices and meat in an earth oven. You have to wait a couple of hours but it’s an incredible meal. The ceremony behind this process of Mother Earth birthing food is powerful. We also learn about creative ways Indigenous farmers are working with what is available to navigate drought and how they are leveraging herbs and trees for medicinal purposes to heal their communities.
We also spend time in a Kichwa community in the Amazon. While there, our host shares a practice that they do in their community every day around three o’clock in the morning. Everybody gets up and drinks a tea called guayusa. It’s sourced from a local plant, and everyone drinks the tea and shares about their dreams around the fire. It’s a sort of intergenerational transfer of knowledge. There is even knowledge to be learned from how much foam is in the tea each day, as it guides the community on whether to go out fishing or stay close to home.
We’re planning to run this study abroad program again this Early Fall Start and we are still looking for students to join us. The deadline has been extended to March 1st. It’s an amazing opportunity for students who want to spend time in the Andes and the Amazon. Ecuador is a small country so you can go from the Andes to the Amazon in a few hours.
For a long time, we’ve been trying to figure out how to create more equitable relationships between the university and the Global South. Over the past few years, I have become increasingly interested in teaching about and researching critical university studies. One of the great books about this is A Third University Is Possible by K. Wayne Yang, Provost of John Muir College and Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC, San Diego. Under the pen name of la paperson, he suggests there is a way to think about the university as a machine. He argues machines don’t care for us, and so we should not romanticize any university as a place that’s going to take care of all our wants, needs and desires. He takes the idea of a scyborg and suggests that even though we are all within the machinery of the university, which can feel confining at times, there are opportunities to do things differently and that the machinery can extend our own agency. He gives a great example of how R2-D2 is the true hero of Star Wars. R2-D2, by connecting with the Death Star, makes the victory of the rebels possible.
During the 2023-2024 academic year, I collaborated with Anita Ramasastry in the School of Law and the Office of Global Affairs, and Muindi F Muindi in the Office of Global Affairs on an initiative called Worlds of Difference. We were grateful to receive financial support from the Simpson Center for the Humanities for a project called Activating the Third University. We were curious about how to borrow K. Wayne Yang’s ideas and apply them to a global context. Our aim was to facilitate conversations and collective endeavors to investigate, address, and redress the UW’s implicit and complicit contributions, as a global university, to the reproduction of global hierarchies of race, gender, class, and geography, and in the reproduction of knowledge as the preserve of those most privileged by such hierarchies.
We organized an iterative and participatory process to involve the UW community and our global partners in tasks that focused on institutional, intellectual, and relational change. We brought in fellow thinkers from inside and outside the university to help us imagine different ways of connecting the university to partners in the Global South. We sought knowledge from Ben Gardner (School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell), Anu Taranath (Department of English and Comparative History of Ideas Department, UW Seattle) and Ron Krabill (School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell) through their work with the Global Reciprocity Network. We hosted working groups, virtual and in-person events and a graduate microseminar to examine these big questions. It was all about how we can use the idea of a third university to really inform and guide the way the university engages with the world. It was incredible to gather hundreds of students, staff and faculty across all three campuses and create space for them to share their experiences and perspectives.
The book is a collaboration with a tribal member of the Tohono O’odham community and nation. Tohon O’odham means “people of the desert.” It’s an Indigenous nation that exists on both sides of the Mexico-US border, and it’s existed there since time immemorial. At one point, the northern quarter of the reservation was the deadliest corridor for migrant passing in the Americas. Mike Wilson, my coauthor, is a renowned human rights activist. His religious and ethical commitments led him to set up water stations for migrants on the Nation’s lands. He had a crisis of conscience after serving in the US military in Central America in the 1980s, leading him to seminary education in San Francisco. He believed he had a different way to work in the world. He became an immigration advocate after witnessing poverty, racism and border policing at the Mexico-US border.
I spent over a decade working on this book with Mike. It’s an oral history project, but told in two voices. Mike tells a story in his own words and then I share an essay in between the chapters of the stories Mike shares.
My essays zoom out and are hyperlink testimonials – every part of his life opens up a different moment of thinking about the legacies of colonialism, missionary culture and US immigration policies.
For example, there is a chapter on residential boarding schools. Mike’s grandfather was one of the first O’odham kids taken to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. I found pictures of his grandfather that Mike had never seen. It was incredibly powerful to see those images and share those stories. The book sparks conversation about immigration justice and the importance of rethinking borders. The current narrative around immigration is that it only starts once people cross the Mexico-US border line. However, that obscures the incredible dynamics that displace people from their own homes and their own countries.
Mike’s story illuminates all of that in a personal way. It was an incredible opportunity to work with him and to help him tell his story. In these dark times, Mike’s story is a hopeful one. It’s a story about a person who had really strong convictions and then changed his mind about some of his most fundamental beliefs. He then went out into the world and did something and continues to do things for others in the world. Mike’s story also shows the centrality of Indigenous perspectives. It’s an important reminder that indigeneity is a way of understanding the interconnections of people, land, water and histories.