Sitting down in his office lined with thousands of books and a new Keurig, Professor Ignacio Sánchez Prado, who teaches Mexican cinema, literature and culture at Washington University, divulged his life’s story, his work over the years which culminated in his appointment to the Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress.

Photo by Curran Neenan

Sánchez Prado grew up in Mexico City with his mother, who only had an elementary school education and worked as a government secretary. He mentioned some of the difficulties of growing up, such as being part of a working-class family with a mother who was unemployed for some time. Prado said that his upbringing, full of many challenges, made him “very gritty and resistant.” It also exposed him to the humanities when he was younger because, for a moment, his family did not have a house of their own, so he spent much of his time in the arthouse cinema in Mexico City.

“I stayed and watched everything that I could,” Sánchez Prado said. “I had a heavy diet on art cinema. And then I would buy cheap books and bargain books and read them as much as I could.” However, he iterated how his choice to pursue the humanities was risky since the “job market for it was dismal.” He even contemplated studying STEM, but decided to follow his true passion.
Sánchez Prado’s interests span far more genres than his intellectual research on Mexican cinema. Many of the movies he watched in the art cinema house in Mexico when he was younger were foreign films. However, at the start of his career, he had to make a choice on what he would teach and research, ultimately deciding upon Latin American studies, particularly Mexican cinema and literature.

“It was more of a professional decision, because when I was analyzing graduate programs and the like, it certainly looked that being a Mexican from Mexico allowed me to have a better shot at the job market,” he said. “And I did not have the luxury to take a risk of trying to be the person with a foreign accent trying to teach American literature. I pigeonholed myself on being an expert on Mexico since at that time it became a pathway to have a career, and I think that it worked out. It was depressing sometimes, but it is what it is.”

However Sánchez Prado said, he didn’t have any regrets about his choice.

“I didn’t know at the time, and I know now, is that when you live in the [United States] and you’re a privileged Mexican that has the ability to do things like teach in college, there’s a desperate need in the United States to educate people about Mexico…,” he said. “I understood that there was almost an ethical duty to represent my country, even if it was at the expense of other intellectual interests, which I still pursue non-professionally.”

Due to his expertise and contribution to his field, Sánchez Prado was recently chosen as one of the Library of Congress’ five Kluge Chairs, focusing on Countries and Cultures of the South, which covers Latin America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

His chair’s role provides him access to the endless resources within the Library of Congress in addition to a paid residence in Washington D.C. over the summer.

“I was actually stunned because when they sent me the first email,” Sánchez Prado said, “you know, I can be a distrustful person, so I thought that it was a mistake or someone just trolling me, but no, it was the director of the [Kluge] Center.”

Sánchez Prado’s colleague, Professor J. Andrew Brown, who serves as the Chair of Romance Languages and Literatures at Wash. U., says that when he first met Prado, he saw that Professor Sánchez Prado was “smart, energetic, enthusiastic and full of potential.”

“He has lots of reasons to think highly of himself, yet gives so much of his time,” Brown said. “…He’s a mentor to not only students here, but professors as well.”

In addition to his research, Sánchez Prado occasionally comments on recent works on Mexico. He recently wrote an editorial for the Washington Post responding to the controversial novel, “American Dirt,” by Jeanine Cummins, a story of a mother and her son trying to escape to the United States from Mexico after the rest of their family is killed by a drug cartel. Oprah Winfrey chose it as one of her novels for her Book Club, exposing the book to a mass audience and compelling Sánchez Prado to write on it. He argued that the author did not do proper research on the Mexican migrant experience and was incompetent to do the job.

“You have to write with a sense of responsibility regarding the very complicated relationship that Mexico and the [United States] have,” Sánchez Prado said. “Anything that is not that fuels the bad parts of the relationship.”

Currently, Prado is writing “Popular Cosmopolitanism,” a book analyzing adaptations of European literature into popular cinema, such as melodramas and comedies, in Mexico. He hopes to illustrate that Mexico, especially its working-class culture, can be cosmopolitan and that cultural richness is not clustered solely in Europe and the United States. Sánchez Prado hopes to challenge narratives and contradict stereotypes about the country, and his recognition as a Kluge Chair is one step in demonstrating the impact and importance of his work today.