When Dagoberto Gilb came to serve as writer-in-residence at the University of Houston-Victoria and found a literary center, he was assured he’d only have to teach one course per semester.
“I had a contract, an agreement whose validity all academics take for granted based on academic traditions and guarantees that are honored across the country,” Gilb told the Texas Observer.
After eight years and under new leadership, the university asked Gilb to teach two more classes. Gilb sued for breach of contract and discrimination in state court, characterizing this as part of a campaign to “bully and force [him] into either retirement or a complete alteration of his agreement with UHV.”
“When the president of the university was responding in his communications with Dago, instead of saying ‘Professor Gilb,’ he says: ‘Senor Gilb,’ you know—without the tilde,” said Gilb’s attorney, Joe Crews.
UHV pushed the case to federal court, where it was dismissed based on sovereign immunity—which, as Alice-in-Wonderland as this sounds, means that no one can sue the state-funded school unless the university permits it. Gilb filed another lawsuit in state court, which is still pending.
Gilb described this treatment he and his literary journal Huizache received as an “aggressive, dismissive stupidity, arrogance, ignorance that I’d call racist in its absence of awareness at its minimum.”
, a Chicano-focused literary magazine that received immediate national attention from media outlets like the and the , could not make it in Texas. Gilb seems to blame his own naïveté when he sarcastically writes in the latest issue: “Is it surprising that Texas didn’t respect such a premiere MexAm mag? With its wonderful history of treating us so lovingly along the long border and inside all its cities, legal
