This past weekend, I attended a retirement celebration for my godfather, Jorge Huerta. Though I’ve always known of Jorge’s outstanding reputation as a scholar and teacher, I’ve better known him and my godmother Ginger as close confidants and family.

In a packed theater at UCSD, I better learned about my connection to the loved educator and appreciated what one speaker called Jorge’s “Pedagogy of Chisme.” As the preeminent scholar in Chicano Theater, Jorge’s passion helps fuel the work and vivacity of a movement. As Luis Valdez said in the evening, the playwright found his reflection in Jorge and the two have been working closely since shortly after Luis Valdez’s founding of El Teatro Campesino. Valdez said that Jorge illustrates the function of the scholar in a living breathing movement. And I think this is why I felt so inspired on Saturday; of course I’m immensely proud of the academic contributions that Jorge’s work represents (I remember struggling as a first year undergraduate student reading one of Jorge’s texts and cobbling together the academic writing with the myriad dinner-table stories shared and the outlandish tales my father would share of traveling with a teatro). However, more importantly, Jorge’s work helps frame the way that teaching, directing, and something as seemingly benign as theater (at least as it’s viewed by public school districts today) can be revolutionary.

Similarly, Cherríe Moraga inspired me with her call for more of what’s become a “scarce commodity”: diálogo. She spoke of the acceptance she found through dialogue with Jorge when others were less accepting of a Chicana lesbian playwright. She spoke plainly of not always agreeing with Jorge and of needing to continue to challenge one another, a challenge I see within the education community to provoke ourselves. I was reminded of my own advisor’s call for us – as scholars – to prove that critical pedagogy, cultural modeling, and all of that “stuff” that we so firmly believe works in the classroom actually works. In Moraga’s call for dialogue – and in her enunciation of the role of desire in our work as scholars as teachers – I recognized the continued landscape of hard work ahead for educators at large.

While many bemoaned the fact that Jorge and Ginger are leaving San Diego in the coming months, I’m more than excited that my godparents will be in Los Angeles (and even more thrilled to mooch amazing meals on a regular basis). I’m excited about the possibilities that loom in the future for Jorge, as he is loosened from a “corporate university.” And I’m excited about regularly trying to wrangle him into discussing Chicano Theater with my students. I’m excited about the infinite-spiral path of empty fullness we take as we move forward as teachers, students, scholars, and citizens of a global society.